VP of Engineering

About Us

Socket helps devs and security teams ship faster by cutting out security busywork. Thousands of orgs use Socket to safely find, audit, and manage open source code. Our customers - from Anthropic to xAI, and Figma to Vercel - love Socket (just check out their tweets to see for yourself!) Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a long-time open source maintainer with software downloaded over a billion times a month, Socket has raised $125M in funding from top angels, operators, and security leaders.

What You'll Do

• Scale the engineering organization from 40 to 80+ people while protecting the velocity, code quality, and culture that makes Socket work.
• Own two intertwined responsibilities: be the operational leader who keeps the organization unblocked and coordinated, AND be the technical leader who shapes architecture decisions and keeps the team executing with urgency.
• Design an operating system that actually works. Build planning cadence, sprint structure, and decision-making processes that are lightweight enough to stay fast and rigorous enough to catch risks early.
• Document how Socket makes decisions so new engineers understand the culture, not just the rules.
• Build technical leadership across the organization. Create weekly coordination rhythms so teams sync proactively. Define clear growth paths so engineers know how to advance.
• Eliminate operational friction. Identify the five biggest bottlenecks slowing the team down. By month six, those problems should be solved and measurable.
• Keep hands-on technical credibility. Spend about 35% of your time on real technical work: code review, architecture decisions, mentoring leads, unblocking hard problems. This is not negotiable. Your technical credibility determines whether the team respects your leadership.
• Partner on technical strategy. Help articulate where Socket's architecture is heading. Create lightweight architecture review processes so major decisions are coordinated and informed, not siloed. Establish culture and feedback loops that scale.
• Run skip-level 1-on-1s to understand what's actually blocking people. Institute monthly retrospectives so the team learns from each other's wins and failures. Build a feedback culture where code review is learning and where architecture reviews strengthen decisions instead of slowing them down.

What You'll Bring

• You've scaled an engineering organization up to 100 people. You remember exactly what broke along the way and how you fixed it. You can articulate what "good" looks like at each scale and why the things that worked at 40 people stop working at 100.
• You've built and executed operating systems for large organizations. You can walk through your planning process, how you manage dependencies, your sprint cycle, and how you surface risks.
• You build structure without creating bureaucracy. Deep hands-on technical depth. You code regularly. You can have sophisticated conversations about architecture, distributed systems, and trade-offs. You can explain a major technical decision you made and whether you'd make it again. You're not afraid to challenge engineers on design.
• You've managed complex cross-functional programs. You have concrete examples of coordinating 4+ teams on major initiatives. You surface dependencies upfront, handle conflicts thoughtfully, and keep complex programs on track.
• You work exceptionally well with founders and hands-on leadership. You push back thoughtfully when you disagree. You complement our strengths. You don't need to be the smartest person in the room; you need to make the smartest people on your team better.
• You have experience with security or supply chain security. You've shipped security features or worked on infrastructure security. You understand why this problem matters. You care about culture as much as you care about execution.

Benefits

• Market competitive salary bands
• Meaningful equity program
• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage)
• Paid parental leave
• Remote-first, with quarterly team off-sites

Pursue Excellence

We set ourselves apart by consistently delivering work of exceptional quality and distinction. Move with urgency and focus: We prioritize swift, decisive action. Think rigorously: We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We value alternative perspectives and have constructive discussions. Trust and amplify: We overtrust, always assume good intent, and give specific feedback to help each other improve. Feel a strong sense of ownership: We wear many hats and feel a strong sense of overall ownership of the company and we're non-territorial regarding our nominal domains. Are customer obsessed: We relentlessly prioritize the needs of our customers, striving to exceed their expectations and delight them at every interaction.