VP, Engineering

VP, Engineering

Department: Software Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Remote, UK

Description

We are seeking an experienced, inspirational Vice President of Engineering to lead our global engineering function. They will be responsible for defining and executing the technical strategy, leading the organisation, and ensuring the quality, performance, and resilience of our Java open-source based in‑memory Real‑Time Data Platform. This role requires a leader who is both a strategic planner and hands‑on manager of world‑class engineering teams.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

I. Technical Strategy & Product Delivery

• Product Strategy & Roadmap Co-Ownership: Collaborate with Product Management to define, prioritize, and drive the technical direction of the product roadmap, ensuring engineering input enhances technical execution, architectural quality, commercial value, differentiated packaging, and timely delivery through agile processes.
• Roadmap Execution: Drive, own and manage end‑to‑end engineering delivery against the product roadmap, utilising agile methodologies to ensure rapid, predictable, and high‑quality releases.
• Quality & Resilience: Maintain and continuously elevate world‑class standards for system quality, performance, security, and resilience across the entire platform.
• Technical Expertise: Provide oversight for core technical domains, including distributed systems, high‑performance Java, concurrency, streaming/stream processing, and data structures.

II. Open Source Software Leadership

• Open Source Stewardship: Steward Hazelcast’s open‑source core with a strong commitment to transparency, stability, and long‑term compatibility, ensuring community trust while advancing enterprise capabilities.
• Open Source/Commercial Balance: Balance the needs of commercial customers with the expectations of a global, user‑led open‑source community, making principled decisions about feature placement, deprecations, and roadmap visibility.
• Community Feedback: Convert high‑volume user feedback from diverse production environments into clear engineering priorities, ensuring the OSS platform remains robust, predictable, and widely adoptable.
• Ecosystem: Maintain disciplined reliability across Hazelcast’s multi‑language client ecosystem and seamless upgrades for all users.
• Superior Developer and Operator Experience: Champion exceptional developer and operator experience, driving documentation quality, release clarity, and community engagement to strengthen Hazelcast’s ecosystem.

• Global People Leadership: Lead, motivate, and manage a highly distributed, global engineering team, fostering a people‑centric managerial approach and an aggressive, collaborative engineering culture. The majority of our Engineers are based in the UK with smaller teams across EMEA.
• Culture & Ethos: Instill a strong product‑led, innovation ethos within the company, guiding engineering teams to imagine the product primarily as a customer acquisition and value‑delivery tool.
• Organizational Design: Evolve and optimise the organisational structure for maximum performance, resilience, scalability, and ownership.
• Talent Acquisition & Planning: Involvement in headcount planning to ensure a right‑sized, highly skilled, and diverse global engineering organisation.
• Managerial Development: Identify, coach, mentor, and develop engineering managers within the organisation, creating clear career paths for both technical and managerial career tracks.
• Performance Management: Ensure teams are empowered and aligned with company goals, providing frequent, actionable, and constructive feedback to support personal development and measure team outcomes.

• Field Engagement: On occasion and with key customers, partner with Sales for critical field training, enablement, and some customer‑facing activity, serving as a technical representative for the company.
• Developer Relations: Inspire and engage advanced developers globally, encouraging contributions to our open‑source projects and fostering a vibrant technical community.

WHAT YOU HAVE

• Executive Leadership: 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years operating at the VP and/or director level, preferably in a B2B enterprise software or platform company. Demonstrated experience fostering a product‑led culture and driving commercial results through engineering excellence.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep, hands‑on understanding of complex architectures, concurrent, distributed systems, high‑performance compute, and real‑time data architectures.
• Open Source Software Expertise: Excel at balancing open‑source community expectations with enterprise requirements, maintaining rigorous public API discipline, documentation standards, and governance practices. Experience nurturing a global developer and operator community across polyglot clients, cloud‑native deployments and hybrid environments.
• Global Team Management: Proven track record of successfully leading a geographically distributed, international engineering organisation.
• Technical Depth: A strong foundation in the core technologies relevant to the Hazelcast platform including Java, concurrency, networking, data streaming, SQL, distributed data stores, data grids. Ideally recent experience and an appetite to be hands‑on in development especially using Java‑based technologies.
• Agile and Delivery: Expertise in modern agile methodologies and continuous delivery pipelines, focused on delivering product capabilities rapidly and reliably.
• Customer‑Centric/Team Aligner: Comfortable working backward from the customer and working in an “open‑kitchen,” GTM aligned environment.

• Entrepreneurial Spirit: The ability to approach the engineering function as a startup within the larger company, constantly seeking ways to innovate and improve.
• Communication: Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills, capable of communicating complex technical strategy to both internal teams (engineering, product) and external stakeholders (customers, analysts, board).
• Influence: Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries, driving alignment between Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

BENEFITS

• 25 days Annual Leave + Bank Holidays + Quarterly Wellbeing Days
• Group Company Pension Plan
• Private Medical Insurance
• Private Dental Insurance
• Life Insurance
• EAP (Employee Assistance Program)