VP of Engineering

Socket•San Francisco, CA

15h•Remote

About The Position

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 $65M of funding from top angels, operators, and security leaders. A Letter From Our Founder & CEO: We've built something rare at Socket. A 40-person engineering team that moves with velocity and keeps a high bar on what ships. We don't have the usual dysfunction that plagues fast-growing companies. What we do have is clarity about the problem we're solving, alignment on what matters, and people who care about doing work that actually protects the software supply chain. Now we're at an interesting inflection point. We need to double the engineering organization while keeping everything that made us fast. That's the core problem: how do you stay fast and maintain code quality and culture while you scale from 40 to 80+ engineers? The best engineering organizations don't scale because they hire more of the right people. They scale because they've designed how decisions get made, how work gets prioritized, how teams coordinate without creating meetings overhead, how people get unblocked. The operating system is the difference between a team that grows and a team that fractures under its own weight. Socket has a strong technical leadership team. What we're missing is someone who owns the operating system. Someone who looks at how we're currently shipping things and says "this works for 40 people, but it won't work for 80, and here's what we need to change. Someone who understands that keeping engineers happy and keeping the product moving fast are the same problem, not competing problems. This role is about protecting what we've built while scaling it. It's about designing planning processes and team structure and decision-making rhythms that are lightweight enough to stay fast and rigorous enough that dependencies surface before they become problems. It's about identifying the engineering leaders who can own their domains and then creating the conditions where they can do their best work. You'll spend about two-thirds of your time on operations and people leadership. The other third stays hands-on technical. Not because we need more code reviewed, but because your technical credibility determines whether people actually trust your leadership on the hard calls. You work directly with me. The decisions you make about how the team operates will shape Socket for the next three years. This is partnership, not delegation. If you've scaled an engineering organization before, if you understand that how you build is as important as what you build, and if you want to work on something that actually matters, let's talk.

Requirements

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.
A track record of moving fast and shipping.
You can point to the biggest things you've shipped in the last year: how long they took, how many people, what the impact was.
You optimize for speed without sacrificing quality.
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 care about culture as much as you care about execution.
You believe that how you build is as important as what you build.

Nice To Haves

Experience with security or supply chain security is a plus.
You've shipped security features or worked on infrastructure security.
You understand why this problem matters.

Responsibilities

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.
Own delivery on major cross-team initiatives.
Define what success looks like, track progress weekly, manage dependencies, escalate risks early.
Keep hands-on technical credibility.
Spend about 35% of your time on real technical work: code review, architecture decisions, mentoring leads, unblocking hard problems.
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.