Head of Product Engineering

Location: Remote (EMEA) · Germany/Munich preferred - CET/CEST time zone

Hi — I'm Grigory, co-founder and CTO at Secfix.

At Secfix we're building security compliance systems for teams and agents to become and stay compliant with less effort. We're already the category leader in Europe. AI is changing how software gets built, and we're shaping the tools this new era requires.

I've spent most of my career believing that the best engineering leaders aren't the ones who run the most meetings. They're the ones who make everyone around them faster, clearer, and more proud of their work — and they can do that because they've been through the hard technical problems themselves.

Since we started, I've done the engineering management myself: 1:1s, hiring, design reviews, performance conversations. The team is 8 engineers and 2 product designers, and I'm spread across too many things. If we were a football team, we'd be a good regional side that just made it to the Bundesliga — talented, hard-working, winning quite a few games. Now we need a coach who's played at Champions League level and can take us there to win every week.

That means an engineering leader who can still ship. Someone who owns the engineering end-to-end — the technical decisions, the pace, and the people who will lead the teams —and has product taste — who notices when a feature takes three weeks that should take one, and when it ships on time but isn't good enough. You won't ship weekly — you'll need focus — but you'll build with the team often enough to know the playbook still works.

You'll work directly with me. Two things matter most here: speed and taste. Most teams pick one. We need both to win.

• Grigory

WHY SECFIX EXISTS

Over 1.78 million SMBs in Europe need to comply with security frameworks — ISO 27001, GDPR, TISAX, SOC 2 — just to sell to enterprise customers. The process is manual, painful, and takes over a year. We automated it.

Our 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. Our fastest customer was certified in 4 weeks instead of the industry-standard 12+ months.

We've raised €17M in total (€12M Series A), backed by Alstin Capital, Neosfer (Commerzbank), and Bayern Capital. We're on a profitable trajectory, growing fast, and building the team that will take us to own European market from SMBs to mid market.

This space is not threatened by AI; it's amplified by it. Compliance requires deep domain expertise combined with automation. Our new AI product (CISO AI) is just getting started, and there's a huge amount of engineering work ahead: agentic workflows, intelligent evidence collection, context-aware policy generation, and more.

WHAT YOU'LL ACTUALLY DO IN THE FIRST 3 MONTHS

This isn't a role where you show up and start running standups. There are no standups. Here's how the first quarter goes:

Month 1: Ship. Get into the codebase and ship a meaningful feature with AI alongside the team. You don't need to be the fastest engineer in the room, but the team needs to see that you can build at the level you'll ask of them and can ask the right questions.

Month 2: Make the team faster. 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. Start regular 1:1s with each engineer, focused on weekly output, quality, and how well they use AI.

Month 3: Own hiring and the team shape. Take over engineering hiring and build a process that runs without my oversight. Decide how the team is organised as it grows, and which lead roles we hire or grow into first. The next people we bring in should raise the pace again. I will be there but switch my focus to final interviews.

WHAT WILL THE ROLE LOOK LIKE BEYOND THE FIRST 3 MONTHS?

After the first quarter, the job is running engineering: the organisation and the technical direction. You 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. We're 8 engineers and 2 product designers today and plan to be around 16 within 12 months — most of that hiring is yours to run.

You won't ship weekly, but you'll build something with the team now and then, because that's how you know the playbook still gets things out the door. Our CS and Sales leaders work the same way — they still own a small slice of the IC work, so they have skin in the game.

Here's what you'll be close to in the next months:

• Speed. You’ll refine our software development processes to keep the team operating at high velocity. Cycle time from spec to production is your number and accountability. Tooling, review flow, how work is split, who's on what — whatever moves it.
• Quality. 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.
• Organisation and leadership. Team structure, levels and performance reviews, the hiring plan, and the managers and tech leads who will run the teams.
• AI in the craft — and in the management. Engineers already work with an established set of encoded skills and rules — there's a whole playbook; you keep pushing that. Same for your own work: hiring, 1:1s, the recurring stuff.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

At 6 months: The hiring process runs without me, and we've added 2 engineers through it. Sales, CS, and product all feel the difference in how fast we ship — and in quality.

At 12 months: The team is around 12-16, the zero-bug policy is still holding at that size, and I'm not in the engineering critical path anymore. You've hired or grown the first engineering managers and tech leads, and the structure will hold through the next doubling.

HOW WE WORK

We've written in depth about our engineering culture. Here's the short version — read the full articles linked below if you want the real picture.

• Focus is sacred. Engineers are in fewer than 2 hours of meetings per week. We write before we meet. We use Loom for async walkthroughs, Notion for specs, Gather for pairing, and Slack only for what's urgent or lightweight. We don't do status theatre. We wrote about our thoughtful communication https://www.notion.so/33448601ddf88090b8e5dce0875087f7?pvs=21 and our remote culture https://www.notion.so/33348601ddf880f8930adfe6f044040c?pvs=21; give it a read.

To drive it home, here's a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over a year:

[https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/9f57512d-58dc-4008-b5c8-ad772681c9b9/04f42a4d-74c8-46fe-9c79-0b0615aac699/iScreen%20Shoter%20-%20Podgla%CC%A8d%20-%2.jpg]

• Small, temporary teams. A designer and two engineers. A backend engineer and a CS person. The group forms around the problem, ships, and dissolves. No standing squads, no permanent team structures — at least not yet. The people closest to the problem usually shape the solution.
• AI is already part of the craft. We use Claude for product design exploration and spec drafting. Engineers work in Cursor with encoded skills and rules that live in the codebase — component patterns, folder structure, architecture choices, and the path from Figma to Angular code. AI checks code against architecture rules before human review. We have a dedicated design QA skill that compares Figma against coded output. We don't use AI to lower the bar; we use it to reach the bar faster with more iterations behind us. In case you’re interested, we wrote a piece about it here https://www.notion.so/Building-production-grade-product-with-AI-in-2ddf8808997bafcc9f4ec83df?pvs=21.
• Zero-bugs. We take this seriously - this helps us to gain customer trust faster. Especially serious customer-facing problems don't sit in a backlog competing with roadmap work. Critical issues get fixed immediately. High-severity within 48 hours. Every bug has an owner. Weekly quality review as part of Monday planning. Quality as identity, in compliance, being correct isn't a nice-to-have; it's the entire value proposition. We care about edge cases, data integrity, and getting the details right. Customers notice the speed and polish before they can name it. That kind of quality builds trust. In our category, trust is the product.
• We build what customers need https://www.notion.so/33448601ddf880b89f0dd9e1b29da3b4?pvs=21, not what they ask for. Customer feedback is signal, not instructions. Best products are built by people with great taste who treat feedback as signals, not KPIs. We stay close to customers — CS check-ins, support tickets, Mixpanel events, onboarding calls — but none of these sources makes the decision for us.

THIS ROLE IS FOR YOU IF:

• 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. You've thought deeply about what makes them productive, what holds them back, and how to move them forward — and you can spot one in a single interview.
• You have an exceptional IC track record before becoming a manager. You were a senior/principal engineer before you started managing — you didn't skip into management early because coding wasn't working out.
• You have product taste. You notice when a feature ships on time but isn't good enough, and you say so.
• You hold people to a high standard. You're comfortable giving direct feedback and having hard conversations about performance.
• You're hands-on with AI-assisted development. You've used Cursor and Claude Code in real production work, not just toy projects. You have opinions about how AI changes the engineering workflow from ideation to release, and you want to push a team to keep getting faster.
• You've worked in startups. You know what it feels like when there's low process, and the answer is "figure it out and ship it."
• You think engineering culture can stay startup-like at scale. You're optimistic that a small, high-performing team can stay that way as it grows, with little process.
• You communicate proactively in writing. In a remote team, written communication is how decisions get made and context gets shared. But you're not scared of jumping into a pair programming session either.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

REQUIRED

• 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

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

INTERVIEW PROCESS

We want to see how you think, build, and lead — not test you on algorithms. Here's the process:

• 30 min — Intro call with our talent team
• 45 min — Interview with Grigory
• 60 min — Technical interview
• 1.5 hr — AI-assisted build session: system design for a real feature, then building part of it with AI
• 2 hr — Leadership session with the founders

Then you’ll get the offer! If we don't make an offer, we'll tell you why.

WHAT SECFIX GIVES YOU

• Remote: 100% remote with a real virtual office in Gather
• Salary: Competitive, benchmarked to European market rates (we'll share specifics once we talk)
• Equity: Generous package — we're all owners here
• Development budget: €1,000/year — yours to spend on whatever makes you better
• Workspace: Remote workspace support + co-working access
• Holidays: 26 days + local public holidays
• Health insurance: Comprehensive coverage
• Annual retreat: Last time we went to Alicante 🇪🇸 — before that, the Austrian Alps, Portugal, Italy, and the Spanish Islands
• Tech: MacBook, monitors, headphones — the latest