Vice President, Engineering

About the role

Rocket Loans is seeking a VP of Engineering to lead the engineering organization at Rocket Loans. This role will oversee the engineering team across origination, checkout, servicing, and infrastructure. Reporting directly to the Head of Product & Engineering, this leader will partner with product, design, data, and operations leadership to set the standard for engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering org's execution — delivery quality, velocity, and predictability across all product pillars
• Build and maintain the systems that make great engineers want to stay: career ladders, promotion processes, L&D investments, and a culture of craft
• Partner with recruiting to raise the hiring bar and grow the team deliberately
• Establish and evolve our engineering standards, architectural principles, and platform strategy
• Make or facilitate the high-stakes technical decisions — and create the forums where good decisions get made at every level
• Own our approach to technical debt: when to pay it down, when to ship anyway, and how to be honest about tradeoffs
• Be the engineering voice in the room during product planning, roadmap reviews, and exec-level conversations
• Translate business context into engineering priorities — and engineering constraints into product reality
• Partner with data, ops, and compliance to ensure what we build is auditable, reliable, and regulatorily sound in a consumer lending context

Technical Direction

• Drive the maturity initiatives that turn a good team into a great one: execution metrics, operational discipline, incident response, and engineering excellence programs
• Build the kind of feedback loops — retros, postmortems, metrics reviews — that make the org smarter over time
• Model the culture you want: direct, curious, collaborative, high-bar AI & modern tooling
• Lead our posture on AI-assisted development — not as a mandate, but as a discipline we build intentionally with the right foundations in place
• Partner with engineering leads to identify where AI tooling creates real leverage vs. where it creates risk
• Help set the standard for what responsible, effective AI adoption looks like in a regulated fintech

Engineering Culture & Maturity

• Drive the maturity initiatives that turn a good team into a great one: execution metrics, operational discipline, incident response, and engineering excellence programs
• Build the kind of feedback loops — retros, postmortems, metrics reviews — that make the org smarter over time
• Model the culture you want: direct, curious, collaborative, high-bar AI & modern tooling

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering teams at meaningful scale
• Genuinely technical — you can engage at the architecture level, hold your own in system design conversations, and earn credibility with engineers by understanding the work, not just managing it
• Hands-on familiarity with our core stack or close equivalents: TypeScript/Node.js, NestJS or similar backend frameworks, Next.js, PostgreSQL, AWS infrastructure
• Experience navigating platform modernization or migration programs — you know what it takes to move off legacy systems without halting product delivery
• Experience owning engineering culture and org health — not just shipping product
• Comfortable with the full stack of engineering leadership: hiring, performance, career development, technical direction, and cross-functional influence
• Background in consumer lending or financial services (FCRA, TILA, or similar regulatory context) preferred