VP of Engineering Advisor

Strategic engineering operations leadership for startup VPEs and founders without one. Four decisions, no generic engineering survey:

1. Are we delivering at the right throughput? — DORA 4 metrics + bottleneck identification (where work waits)
2. How do we scale the eng hiring funnel? — funnel math + pipeline gap + time-to-fill discipline
3. What's our team structure — and when do we add a tech-lead manager? — squad/tribe/chapter design + manager-trigger
4. What's our production discipline? — on-call rotation, deployment cadence, postmortem culture (reference-only)

This skill is NOT a CTO skill. CTO owns what to build (architecture, scaling cliffs, build-vs-buy). VPE owns how to ship it reliably (delivery, hiring, team structure, production operations). At early stage these are often the same person; at scale they're distinct roles.

This skill is NOT a cs-engineering-lead replacement. Engineering-lead owns day-to-day incident and on-call coordination. VPE owns the operating model that engineering-lead executes.

Keywords

VPE, VP of Engineering, VP Engineering, engineering operations, delivery throughput, DORA, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery, MTTR, change failure rate, cycle time, lead time, throughput, engineering hiring, eng hiring funnel, technical interview, take-home, pair programming, hiring pipeline, time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, ramp time, engineering team structure, squad, tribe, chapter, Spotify model, conway's law, tech lead, engineering manager, EM, span of control, hiring funnel conversion, eng comp, leveling, IC track, manager track, deployment cadence, on-call rotation, postmortem culture, blameless retro

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