VP of Engineering

Job description

**Company Overview:** Zocks is an AI platform transforming how financial advisors work. Starting in the US financial services market, we're building technology that supports advisors across their entire workflow - from sales and meeting preparation to note-taking, follow-ups, scheduling, email, document intelligence, reporting, and integrations with the systems they use every day. Our goal is to take repetitive, manual work out of the advisor-client relationship and turn conversations, documents, and data into actions automatically. As our platform expands across more workflows, customers, and use cases, we're solving increasingly complex challenges around AI, real-time systems, data, security, integrations, and scale. Zocks is headquartered in San Francisco, while our **entire R&D organization - Engineering, Product, Design, Data, and Infrastructure - is based in Budapest**. This means **our Budapest teams don't just execute on a product built elsewhere: they're directly responsible for shaping the product, technology, and how we build them as we grow**. **Location: Budapest, XI., Science Park (On-site Monday to Thursday, Remote on Fridays)** As Zocks continues to grow, we're looking for a **Vice President of Engineering** to help us scale not just our technology, but our engineering organization, playing a key role in scaling a fast-growing AI company. You'll work side by side with our founders, including our CTO, leading our Engineering Managers while helping define how Engineering evolves as we continue building one of the leading AI platforms serving financial advisors across the United States. Today, our engineering organization consists of several development teams (and continues to grow), led by Engineering Managers. In this role, you'll be responsible for developing our engineering leaders, strengthening our engineering culture, and ensuring the organization scales while maintaining high standards of delivery, quality and collaboration. This is a highly strategic leadership position. Rather than joining to execute an existing engineering playbook, you'll have genuine ownership in shaping how Engineering operates at Zocks. Working closely with our CTO, you'll help define our engineering strategy, organizational structure and operating principles, making pragmatic decisions that fit our product, our business and our culture. We're looking for someone who enjoys **building**, not just managing. Someone who sees scaling an engineering organization as an opportunity to create better systems, stronger leaders and a healthier culture—not simply add more people. ### Key challenges you will work on every day: - Partner closely with the CTO to define and execute the **long-term engineering strategy** for Zocks. - **Lead, mentor and develop Engineering Managers** through coaching, feedback, performance management and career development. - Build a high-performing engineering organization focused on ownership, accountability, continuous improvement and sustainable growth. - **Drive engineering effectiveness** by improving delivery predictability, execution quality, planning processes and organizational health. - Shape how Engineering scales by **introducing pragmatic, high-impact improvements** that fit our business and culture, rather than applying one-size-fits-all frameworks. - **Lead large cross-functional technical initiatives** spanning multiple engineering teams, ensuring clear ownership, alignment and successful execution. - **Create alignment** across Engineering while **empowering teams and leaders** to make great decisions close to where the work happens. - **Partner with Product leadership** to balance customer needs, business priorities and long-term engineering investments. - **Define scalable engineering processes**, organizational structures and operating mechanisms as our engineering organization continues to grow. - **Support technical direction at an organizational level** while empowering Engineering Managers and technical leaders to own implementation and technical decisions. - Champion engineering excellence across architecture, quality, security, reliability and operational maturity. - **Represent Engineering in customer-facing conversations when needed**, confidently communicating technical strategy, delivery plans and organizational capabilities to customers and external stakeholders. ### Requirements: - **10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, including extensive experience leading engineering organizations through multiple layers of management.** - Proven experience as a Director of Engineering, VP of Engineering, Head of Engineering, or in a comparable **second-line engineering leadership role.** - Demonstrated success building and developing Engineering Managers while **scaling high-performing engineering organizations**. - Strong background in **product-led B2B SaaS** companies. Experience in software product companies is essential; agency or consulting backgrounds are not a fit for this role. - Experience **defining engineering strategy, operating models and organizational design** with a high degree of ownership and autonomy. - Track record of **improving engineering effectiveness, delivery predictability and leading complex cross-functional initiatives**. - **Outstanding leadership, coaching and stakeholder management skills**, with the ability to influence across Engineering, Product and Executive Leadership. - **Excellent English and Hungarian communication skills**, including experience representing Engineering in customer-facing or executive-level conversations. - Exposure to **security, compliance or enterprise software environments**. - **Technical credibility** gained from working in modern cloud-native software organizations. While this isn't a hands-on coding role, you're comfortable discussing architecture, engineering trade-offs and technical strategy with senior engineering leaders. - Interest in AI technologies and building AI-powered products is a strong advantage. ### Why this role is different: - You'll work directly with our founders and help shape company-wide engineering strategy. - You'll have genuine ownership over how Engineering evolves—not just how it executes. - You'll build leaders, not just teams, and help scale an engineering organization through people. - You'll play a key role in building an AI-first B2B SaaS company with ambitious growth plans. - You'll have the opportunity to leave a lasting organizational legacy by creating systems, culture and leadership practices that scale with the company. ### What success looks like: - You build an engineering organization that scales through strong leaders, delivers predictably, and continuously raises the bar on quality, execution and collaboration. - You become a trusted strategic partner to our CTO, helping shape not only how we build software, but how Engineering evolves as a core competitive advantage for Zocks. - You foster a culture where Engineering Managers thrive, teams take ownership, and engineers can do their best work. - You help create an engineering organization that people are excited to join—and proud to be part of. - Most importantly, you leave the engineering organization stronger than you found it.