• 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.
• Team and hiring. Team structure, growth conversations, the hiring process, and eventually the next manager.
• 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 found and/or coached the EM Nr. 2 to support growth.

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 and our remote culture ; 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:

• 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 .
• 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 , 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.

• You've managed a real team and made it ship faster. You've hired for it, run the hard conversations, and know what breaks as it grows — 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.

Required

• 8+ years as a software engineer, including 4+ years managing a team of 8+ and hiring for it yourself
• 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 grown a team to 15+ at a VC-funded startup
• Managed tech leads or a second manager
• Previous experience at a fully remote company

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