Vice President, Engineering

Who we are...

Verra Mobility is a global leader in smart mobility. We develop technology-enabled solutions that help the world move safely and easily. We are fostering the development of safe cities, working with police departments and municipalities to install over 4,000 red-light, speed, and school bus stop arm safety cameras across North America. We are also creating smart roadways, serving the world's largest commercial fleets and rental car companies to manage tolling transactions and violations for over 8.5 million vehicles. And we are a leading provider of connected systems, processing nearly 165 million transactions each year across 50+ individual tolling authorities.

Culture

Verra Mobility Corporation is a dynamic, entrepreneurial company that operates with a people-first philosophy and approach. The company lives by its core values—Do What’s Right, Choose Courage Over Comfort, Win Together, and Own It—in everything it does for its customers and team members. The company seeks to grow, both organically and through acquisition, to continue to be the undisputed market leader with a bias for action, customer focus, teamwork, drive for results, and commitment to excellence.

Position Overview

The VP, Engineering owns new product development and rapid prototyping for Verra Mobility, reporting to the SVP, Software Engineering. This role operates with an enterprise architecture view of the company's technology landscape, identifying where new capabilities should be built as standalone bets versus extending existing platforms, and is expected to bring current, in depth domain knowledge of urban mobility to every evaluation.

You will run a lean discovery and incubation function that takes a hypothesis from concept to working prototype quickly, with a clear keep or kill signal at each stage, and a defined path for successful bets to graduate into an existing portfolio or seed a new one. This is a hands on, high aptitude technical role; you are expected to personally evaluate emerging technology.

Essential Responsibilities

Innovation Strategy & Enterprise Architecture

• Technology Vision: Set the enterprise view of where new product investment should go, weighing build versus buy versus partner decisions against the company's existing platform architecture and total cost of ownership.

• Portfolio Fit: Partner with the senior technology leadership to determine whether a new capability should be built as a standalone incubation bet, absorbed into an existing platform, or sourced from a vendor or partner.

• Standards Alignment: Ensure prototypes and new products emerging from this function are built on architecture patterns and standards consistent enough with the broader engineering organization that a successful bet can graduate cleanly rather than requiring a rebuild.

Rapid Prototyping & Product Incubation

• Discovery & Incubation: Own a time boxed process for exploring new product opportunities, moving from hypothesis to a working prototype fast enough to test real market and technical assumptions before committing significant investment.

• Proof of Concept Delivery: Personally lead or work directly alongside engineers building proof of concept solutions, particularly where the technology is new to the organization, such as drone based monitoring platforms or next generation automated enforcement sensing.

• Graduation Path: Define and run the process by which a validated prototype transfers into an established portfolio for full scale delivery, or seeds a new product line, with a clean technical and organizational handoff.

• Kill Discipline: Apply clear, honest kill criteria to bets that are not working, protecting the function's credibility and the company's investment from becoming attached to projects that should be stopped.

• Toolkit Selection: Choose and maintain a rapid prototyping toolkit spanning low code platforms, serverless cloud backends, and containerized services, so a new concept can go from idea to demonstrable prototype in days rather than months.

Domain Expertise & Technology Scouting

• Urban Mobility: Maintain current, working knowledge of trends and emerging technology across urban mobility, tolling, and transportation infrastructure, sufficient to identify which external innovations are relevant to Verra Mobility's roadmap.

• Automated Enforcement: Bring in depth knowledge of automated enforcement technology, including detection, evidence capture, and citation workflows, so new product concepts in this space are evaluated with real domain credibility rather than generic engineering judgment.

• Drone & Aerial Monitoring: Track the regulatory, sensor, and platform landscape for drone based and other aerial monitoring technology relevant to enforcement and mobility use cases, and translate that landscape into concrete prototype opportunities.

• Vendor & Partner Evaluation: Evaluate emerging technology vendors and partners critically, including their architecture claims, sufficient to make a credible build versus buy versus partner recommendation.

• IoT & Connected Devices: Guide prototype architecture for connected sensor and camera hardware, including device fleet management and the telemetry protocols needed to move data reliably from field hardware to the cloud.

• Embedded Systems: Bring working knowledge of embedded and firmware development to prototypes that involve custom hardware, sufficient to have a credible technical conversation with firmware engineers rather than treating embedded work as a black box.

Cross Functional Partnership

• Executive Alignment: Partner with the SVP, Software Engineering and peer VPs across Delivery and the International Portfolio to keep new product investment aligned with company strategy and to sequence graduations without disrupting steady state delivery.

• Talent & Culture: Build and lead a small, senior team capable of moving at incubation speed, and personally model the hands on technical depth expected of the function.

We are looking for a leader who combines enterprise level technical judgment with genuine, current depth in the domains that matter most to this business:

Enterprise Technology Vision

Comfortable setting technology direction at a company wide level, not just for a single product, and translating that vision into concrete build, buy, or partner decisions.

Domain Depth

Real, current knowledge of urban mobility, automated enforcement, and drone or aerial monitoring technology, gained through direct experience rather than secondhand exposure.

Hands On Prototyping Aptitude

High technical aptitude and the willingness to personally build, test, and evaluate new technology rather than exclusively directing others to do so.

Judgment Under Uncertainty

Strong instincts for when to invest further in a bet and when to kill it, balancing entrepreneurial urgency with financial and technical discipline.

Qualifications

• Experience: 10+ years in software engineering or product technology roles, with at least 5 years at the senior leadership or VP level in a medium to large technology or technology enabled services company, including meaningful time in an enterprise architecture, innovation, or new product incubation capacity, with a track record of taking concepts from idea to working prototype.

• Education: A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience is required; an advanced degree is a plus.

• Domain Knowledge: Demonstrated, current knowledge of urban mobility and transportation technology, automated enforcement systems, and drone or aerial monitoring platforms, gained through direct industry experience.

• Technical Fluency: Working knowledge of modern cloud, data, computer vision, and AI or machine learning solution categories current to today's landscape, sufficient to evaluate a vendor pitch or a build proposal critically. Current knowledge of rapid prototyping infrastructure, including serverless infrastructure, API management platforms, Platform as a Service offerings, and containerized infrastructure, is required, along with fluency in modern web technologies such as Node and React, and Progressive Web App architecture for delivering mobile friendly experiences quickly.

• Enterprise Architecture: Experience partnering with or operating as an enterprise architect, with the ability to judge how a new capability fits, or should not fit, into an existing platform landscape.

• IoT & Embedded Systems: Working knowledge of IoT platforms and device fleet management, such as AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub, along with the telemetry protocols needed to move data reliably from field devices to the cloud. Working knowledge of embedded and firmware development, including C, C++, or Rust is required, given how much of this function's prototype work touches field hardware.

• Leadership: A track record of building and leading a small, senior, high output team, and of communicating technology strategy and prototype outcomes clearly to executive stakeholders.

• Regulatory Awareness: Working familiarity with the regulatory environment relevant to drone operation and government facing automated enforcement, sufficient to recognize constraints early in a prototype's development.

Verra Mobility Values

An ideal candidate for this role naturally works in alignment with the Verra Mobility Core Values:

• Own It: We focus on high performance and drive toward breakthrough outcomes. Our employees ensure accountability, optimize and align work, focus on the customer, and cultivate innovation.

• Do What’s Right: We champion integrity and good character. Our team members model ethical behavior, demonstrate good judgment and are courageous.

• Choose Courage Over Comfort: We lean into the conversations, decisions and actions that move the business forward, even when they feel uncomfortable. We challenge assumptions, address issues early and prioritize progress over ease.

• Win Together: We believe in growing and inspiring people together. We seek people who collaborate, value differences, think and act globally, foster an engaging work environment, and recognize and develop others.