S
Head of Product Engineering
Contract type
Freelance
Work mode
Remote · EMEA, Germany, UK
Experience
Lead / principal · 10+ years
Job description
Engineering leadership role at Secfix, owning engineering end-to-end: technical direction, pace, quality, hiring and team organisation, while staying hands-on with AI-assisted development. The role reports directly to the co-founder/CTO and is meant to take the team from 8 engineers to roughly 16 within 12 months.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Remote · EMEA, Germany, UK
What you'll do
- Month 1: Get into the codebase and ship a meaningful feature with AI alongside the team.
- Month 2: Find where features take three weeks that should take one, and fix it — in tooling, in how we review and test, or in who's working on what.
- Month 2: Start regular 1:1s with each engineer, focused on weekly output, quality, and how well they use AI.
- Month 3: Take over engineering hiring and build a process that runs without the CTO's oversight.
- Month 3: Decide how the team is organised as it grows, and which lead roles we hire or grow into first.
- After the first quarter, own how the team builds: how engineers test, how they review each other's code and security, how the team is organised, and who we hire next.
- Refine software development processes to keep the team operating at high velocity; cycle time from spec to production is your number and accountability.
- Improve how engineers test and automate, how they review each other's code and security changes, and how the zero-bug policy survives a team of 20.
- Own team structure, levels and performance reviews, the hiring plan, and the managers and tech leads who will run the teams.
- Keep pushing AI in the craft and in the management: engineers' encoded skills and rules playbook, and your own hiring, 1:1s and recurring work.
- Build something with the team now and then to know the playbook still gets things out the door.
What we're looking for
- 10+ years as a software engineer, including 6+ years leading engineering teams and 2+ years managing managers or tech leads
- You've grown an engineering team to 15+ at a VC-funded startup and hired most of it yourself. You've been through the messy middle, not just read about it
- You've built what a growing team needs from scratch — hiring process, levels, performance reviews, salary bands — and kept it lightweight
- You've shipped AI features to production — retrieval, RAG, agentic workflows — and you know the difference between a demo that works and one that holds up on real customer data
- Product taste: a keen sense for what makes a product feel great, and the habit of saying so when it doesn't
- You've built and shipped with Claude Code and Cursor in real production work, and you have opinions about where AI helps and where it quietly creates debt
- You're an engineer at heart. You were senior or principal before you managed, and you can still hold your own in a design review, a debugging session, or building a feature
- You've built something zero to one at a startup, or scaled a team through the messy middle. You know what it feels like when there's no playbook
- Able to work in European timezone (CET/CEST). EMEA-based, ideally Germany or UK
- You've led an engineering org and made it ship faster
- You've hired managers and engineers, run the hard conversations, and know what breaks as a team grows from 10 to 30 — and you can point to where cycle time dropped because of you
- You know what great engineers look like and can spot one in a single interview
- You have an exceptional IC track record before becoming a manager
- You hold people to a high standard and are comfortable giving direct feedback and having hard conversations about performance
- You're hands-on with AI-assisted development — Cursor and Claude Code in real production work, not just toy projects
- You've worked in startups and know what it feels like when there's low process
- You think engineering culture can stay startup-like at scale
- You communicate proactively in writing
Nice to have
- You've grown an engineering org past 30
- You've taken an engineering team through an ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audit, so you know our customers' side of the product
- You've led engineering for a B2B SaaS product moving from SMB into mid-market
Your team
Engineering
8 engineers and 2 product designers today, planning to be around 16 within 12 months.
Benefits
- 100% remote
How to get hired
- 130 min — Intro call with our talent team
- 245 min — Interview with Grigory
- 360 min — Technical interview
- 41.5 hr — AI-assisted build session: system design for a real feature, then building part of it with AI
- 52 hr — Leadership session with the founders
- 6Then you'll get the offer! If we don't make an offer, we'll tell you why.
Apply
Direct apply at Secfix
Opens the job posting at Secfix
About Secfix
Security compliance systems for teams and agents to become and stay compliant with less effort
Secfix builds security compliance systems for teams and agents to become and stay compliant with less effort. Its platform integrates with a company's full tech stack — AWS, Azure AD, Jira, GitLab, GCP, and more — automatically extracts compliance evidence, and guides teams to certification in weeks instead of months. The company is the category leader in Europe and has raised €17M in total (€12M Series A).
Mission
Automate security compliance so SMBs can become and stay compliant with less effort.
Key facts
- Security compliance software
- Over 1.78 million SMBs in Europe need to comply with security frameworks — ISO 27001, GDPR, TISAX, SOC 2
- Fastest customer was certified in 4 weeks instead of the industry-standard 12+ months
- Raised €17M in total (€12M Series A)
- On a profitable trajectory, growing fast
- New AI product (CISO AI) is just getting started
- Engineering team is 8 engineers and 2 product designers, planning around 16 within 12 months
Partners & customers
Alstin CapitalNeosfer (Commerzbank)Bayern Capital
What they value
- Speed
- Taste
- Quality as identity
- Zero-bugs
- Focus is sacred
- We build what customers need, not what they ask for
- Thoughtful communication
- Remote culture