VP of Engineering - US

About the position

H2 Corporation is an AI-native company modernizing one of the largest and most underserved industries in the world: construction. Founded in Tokyo in 2020 and now expanding globally, H2 is building the next generation AI-powered system of record for quoting and orders for the $13T global construction industry. Our AIS Platform automates takeoff, estimation and quoting, and orders workflows for the largest construction enterprises, helping the industry address a generational labor shortage with AI-driven productivity.We are backed by top-tier investors including NEA, JAFCO, and Spiral Capital, and MetaProp. We are currently a team of 120 members distributed across 5 offices globally, and are scaling rapidly across Japan and the United States.

THE OPPORTUNITY:

H2 is looking for a VP of Engineering, US to lead and scale our US engineering organization.You will lead H2’s US engineering team while partnering closely with the CTO, CEO, Product, Design, and a Japan-based engineering leader who will oversee H2’s Japan and Vietnam engineering teams.This role is about building: the US engineering team, the operating cadence, the technical standards, and the cross-border collaboration model H2 will use as it scales globally. You will help translate complex construction workflows into secure, reliable, AI-native products that solve real operational problems for general contractors.This is not a maintenance leadership role. You are joining early, building from the ground up, and helping define what great engineering looks like at H2 in the US.

WHAT YOU WILL DO:

• Lead execution across key web, AI, and platform initiatives for H2’s US engineering organization.

• Partner with Product, Design, Customer Success, Sales, and business stakeholders to translate customer pain points into scalable technical solutions.

• Partner with the CTO and global engineering leaders to shape technical strategy, architecture, execution, and competency-based hiring standards across H2’s

•US product and platform priorities.• Lead architectural decision-making across web applications, AI-enabled workflows, enterprise integrations, data models, and scalable platform systems.

• Hire, lead, coach, and develop H2’s US engineering organization, with a focus on L3–L4-caliber engineers who can own complex projects, mentor others, and lead ambiguous technical work.

• Build a culture of ownership, urgency, technical excellence, and deep customer empathy.

• Establish practical development processes that improve execution without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.

• Improve visibility into US engineering progress, tradeoffs, risks, and dependencies.

• Build strong working models across US, Japan, and Vietnam teams, including async collaboration, shared standards, clear ownership boundaries, and clean handoffs across time zones.

Requirements

MUST:

• 15+ years of product engineering experience across web, platform, AI, infrastructure, or enterprise software environments.

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including hiring, managing, coaching, and scaling engineering teams.

• Strong experience building, integrating, or scaling AI-enabled products, including applied AI, LLM-enabled workflows, computer vision, machine learning systems, or AI infrastructure.

• Proven ability to lead engineering teams working at the intersection of AI capabilities, product experience, data, and scalable software architecture.

• Experience leading technical decision-making and architectural design for complex software products.

• Strong product instincts and the ability to translate ambiguous customer problems into clear technical direction.

• Experience building development processes that balance speed, quality, reliability, and maintainability.

• Strong cross-functional leadership with Product, Design, GTM, Customer Success, Recruiting, and executive stakeholders.

• A hands-on leadership style. You do not need to write code every day, but you need to be technically credible and close enough to the work to raise the bar.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity, making decisions with incomplete information, and iterating quickly.

• Strong written and verbal communication in English, including the ability to create clarity across US teams and with engineering partners in Japan and Vietnam.

PREFERRED:

• Experience with computer vision, image recognition, construction drawings, takeoff/estimating workflows, or AI applied to complex visual/document-heavy domains.

• Experience in construction tech, industrial software, robotics, vertical SaaS, or enterprise workflow automation.

• Experience building products for complex, non-technical, or field-based users.

• Full-stack technical background across frontend, backend, data, integrations, and platform systems.

• Experience working across Japan-US, APAC-US, or other multinational engineering teams.

• Prior experience scaling engineering at an early-stage or high-growth startup.

IDEAL CANDIDATE PROFILE

• Demonstrates hands-on leadership and inspires those around them

• Takes ownership of the team’s success as if it were their own

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and moves forward by iterating through hypothesis testing

• Deep empathy for user pain points and a strong passion for delivering great products

• Strives for business impact and drives development with a strong sense of urgency

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