VP of Engineering - Socket

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 include Anthropic, xAI, Figma, and Vercel.

Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a long-time open source maintainer, Socket has raised $125M in funding from top angels, operators, and security leaders.

The Role

We're at an inflection point, looking to double our 40-person engineering organization to 80+ while keeping the velocity, code quality, and culture that makes Socket work. We need a VP of Engineering who owns the engineering operating system—designing planning processes, team structures, and decision-making rhythms that stay lightweight and fast.

You'll spend about two-thirds of your time on operations and people leadership, and one-third hands-on technical work (code review, architecture, mentoring) to maintain technical credibility. You will work directly with the founder and CEO.

What You'll Do

• Scale the Engineering Org: Grow the team from 40 to 80+ people while protecting velocity, code quality, and culture.
• Design an Operating System: Build planning cadences, sprint structures, and decision-making processes that provide clarity without heavy bureaucracy.
• Build Technical Leadership: Create coordination rhythms and clear growth paths for engineers.
• Eliminate Operational Friction: Identify and solve major bottlenecks slowing the team down (prioritization, dependencies, code reviews).
• Own Delivery: Manage cross-team initiatives, track progress weekly, and surface risks early.
• Stay Hands-On: Spend about 35% of your time on code reviews, architecture decisions, and unblocking hard technical problems.
• Partner on Strategy: Help shape Socket's technical architecture and lightweight review processes.
• Establish Culture: Run skip-level 1-on-1s, monthly retrospectives, and foster a healthy feedback culture.

What You'll Bring

• Experience scaling an engineering organization up to 100 people.
• Proven track record of building and executing operating systems and planning processes for large organizations.
• Deep hands-on technical depth in distributed systems, architecture, and code.
• Experience managing complex cross-functional programs across multiple teams.
• A track record of moving fast, shipping impactful work, and balancing speed with quality.
• Strong collaboration skills working alongside founders and hands-on leadership.
• Experience with security or supply chain security is a plus.

Benefits

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