VP, Engineering

**What We Are Looking For

We are seeking a visionary, inspirational Senior Vice President of Engineering to lead and scale our global engineering function. They will be responsible for defining our multi-year technical strategy, leading the organization at an executive level, and ensuring the quality, performance, and resilience of our Java open-source based in-memory Real-Time Data Platform.

This role requires an executive leader who is a strategic business partner to the C-suite, a champion of engineering excellence, and a driver of enterprise-wide innovation who can balance long-term technical vision with predictable, world-class execution.

I. Executive Technical Strategy & Product Delivery

• Executive Technical Vision: Define and champion a multi-year technology strategy and architectural vision that anticipates market trends and directly aligns with the company’s long-term business objectives and revenue growth.
• Product Strategy & Roadmap Co-Ownership: Collaborate at the executive level 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.
• Strategic Execution & Delivery: Drive, own, and manage end-to-end engineering delivery against the product roadmap, utilizing agile methodologies to ensure rapid, predictable, and high-quality releases at an enterprise scale.
• Quality & Resilience: Maintain and continuously elevate world-class standards for system quality, performance, security, and resilience across the entire platform, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability for our largest customers.
• Innovation & Future-Proofing: Provide executive oversight for core technical domains (distributed systems, high-performance Java, concurrency, streaming, data structures) while aggressively evaluating and integrating emerging technologies to maintain a competitive market edge.
• Resource & Investment Optimisation: Manage the engineering budget, drive ROI on technology investments, and optimize resource allocation to ensure maximum business impact and operational efficiency.

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, strategic decisions about feature placement, deprecations, and roadmap visibility.
• Industry Thought Leadership: Serve as a prominent voice and advocate for the company within the broader open-source and real-time data ecosystems, influencing industry standards and building strategic technological partnerships.
• 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.

III. Organisational Development & Leadership

• Global Executive 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-led ethos within the department, guiding engineering teams to build and develop the product as a customer acquisition and value-delivery tool
• Organizational Design & Scaling: Evolve and optimize the organisational structure for maximum performance, resilience, scalability, and ownership to support the company's next phase of growth.
• Talent Acquisition & Leadership Development: Lead global headcount planning to ensure a right-sized, highly skilled, and diverse engineering organisation. Build a robust leadership bench and succession plan for critical technical and managerial roles.
• Managerial Development: Identify, coach, mentor, and develop engineering directors and 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.

IV. Go-To-Market and External Partnership

• Executive Collaboration: Partner closely with the CEO, and other C-level executives to report on engineering performance, technological risks, and strategic opportunities.
• Executive Client Sponsorship: Serve as an executive sponsor for key enterprise accounts. Partner with Sales to engage in high-stakes C-level prospect meetings, acting as the ultimate technical authority for the company.
• Developer Relations: Inspire and engage advanced developers globally, encouraging contributions to our open-source projects and fostering a vibrant technical community.

• Executive Leadership: 12+ years of progressive leadership experience in software engineering, with at least 7+ years operating at the VP, SVP, or CTO level, preferably in a B2B enterprise software or platform company. Demonstrated experience fostering a product-led culture and driving commercial results through engineering excellence.
• Business & Strategic Acumen: Proven ability to manage large departmental budgets, optimize engineering spend, and translate complex technical decisions into clear business value for executive-level stakeholders.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep 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 scaling and leading a geographically distributed, international engineering organisation of significant size.
• 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. Ability to engage deeply with Principal Engineers and Architects on complex technical designs.
• Agile and Delivery: Expertise in modern agile methodologies and continuous delivery pipelines, focused on delivering product capabilities rapidly, reliably, and at scale.
• Customer-Centric/Team Aligner: Comfortable working backward from the customer and working in an “open-kitchen,” GTM aligned environment.

Desired Characteristics

• Strategic Visionary & Entrepreneurial Spirit: The ability to look ahead to anticipate technological shifts, while approaching the engineering function with the agility of a startup to constantly innovate and improve.
• Executive Communication: Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills, capable of communicating complex technical strategy to both internal teams (engineering, product) and external stakeholders (C-level customers, analysts, board).
• Influence: Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries, driving alignment between Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing at the highest levels.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline (Master’s or equivalent advanced degree preferred).

• 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)