Senior Engineering Manager, Product Engineering

About the role

Location: Remote (EMEA) · Germany/Munich preferred - CET/CEST time zone Hi — I'm Grigory, co-founder and CTO at Secfix. At Secfix we're building security compliance systems for teams and agents to become and stay compliant with less effort. We're already the category leader in Europe. AI is changing how software gets built, and we're shaping the tools this new era requires. I've spent most of my career believing that the best engineering leaders aren't the ones who run the most meetings. They're the ones who make everyone around them faster, clearer, and more proud of their work — and they can do that because they've been through the hard technical problems themselves. Since we started, I've done the engineering management myself: 1:1s, hiring, design reviews, performance conversations. The team is 8 engineers and 2 product designers, and I'm spread across too many things. If we were a football team, we'd be a good regional side that just made it to the Bundesliga — talented, hard-working, winning quite a few games. Now we need a coach who's played at Champions League level and can take us there to win every week. That means a strong engineering manager who can still ship. Someone who owns the technical decisions, sets the pace, and has product taste — who notices when a feature takes three weeks that should take one, and when it ships on time but isn't good enough. You won't ship weekly — you'll need focus — but you'll build with the team often enough to know the playbook still works. You'll work directly with me. Two things matter most here: speed and taste. Most teams pick one. We need both to win. — Grigory Why Secfix exists Over 1.78 million SMBs in Europe need to comply with security frameworks — ISO 27001, GDPR, TISAX, SOC 2 — just to sell to enterprise customers. The process is manual, painful, and takes over a year. We automated it. Our platform integrates with a company's full tech stack — AWS, Azure AD, Jira, GitLab, GCP, and more — automatically extracts compliance evidence, and guides teams to certification in weeks instead of months. Our fastest customer was certified in 4 weeks instead of the industry-standard 12+ months. We've raised €17M in total (€12M Series A), backed by Alstin Capital, Neosfer (Commerzbank), and Bayern Capital. We're on a profitable trajectory, growing fast, and building the team that will take us to own European market from SMBs to mid market. This space is not threatened by AI; it's amplified by it. Compliance requires deep domain expertise combined with automation. Our new AI product (CISO AI) is just getting started, and there's a huge amount of engineering work ahead: agentic workflows, intelligent evidence collection, context-aware policy generation, and more. What you'll actually do in the first 3 months This isn't a role where you show up and start running standups. There are no standups. Here's how the first quarter goes: Month 1: Ship. Get into the codebase and ship a meaningful feature with AI alongside the team. You don't need to be the fastest engineer in the room, but the team needs to see that you can build at the level you'll ask of them and can ask the right questions. Month 2: Make the team faster. Find where features take three weeks that should take one, and fix it — in tooling, in how we review and test, or in who's working on what. Start regular 1:1s with each engineer, focused on weekly output, quality, and how well they use AI. Month 3: Own hiring. Take over engineering interviews and build a process that runs without my oversight. Design the technical challenges, run the screens, make the calls. The next people we bring in should raise the pace again. I will be there but switch my focus to final interviews. What will the role look like beyond the first 3 months? After the first quarter, the job is management and the technical decisions. You own how the team builds: how engineers test, how they review each other's code and security, how the team is organised, and who we hire next. We're 8 engineers and 2 product designers today and plan to be around 16 within 12 months — most of that hiring is yours to run. You won't ship weekly, but you'll build something with the team now and then, because that's how you know the playbook still gets things out the door. Our CS and Sales leaders work the same way — they still own a small slice of the IC work, so they have skin in the game. Here's what you'll be close to in the next months: Speed. You’ll refine our software development processes to keep the team operating at high velocity. Cycle time from spec to production is your number and accountability. Tooling, review flow, how work is split, who's on what — whatever moves it. Quality. Improve how engineers test and automate, how they review each other's code and security changes, and how the zero-bug policy survives a team of 20. Team and hiring. Team structure, growth conversations, the hiring process, and eventually the next manager. AI in the craft — and in the management. Engineers already work with an established set of encoded skills and rules — there's a whole playbook; you keep pushing that. Same for your own work: hiring, 1:1s, the recurring stuff. What success looks like At 6 months: The hiring process runs without me, and we've added 2 engineers through it. Sales, CS, and product all feel the difference in how fast we ship — and in quality. At 12 months: The team is around 12-16, the zero-bug policy is still holding at that size, and I'm not in the engineering critical path anymore. You've found and/or coached the EM Nr. 2 to support growth. How we work We've written in depth about our engineering culture. Here's the short version — read the full articles linked below if you want the real picture. Focus is sacred. Engineers are in fewer than 2 hours of meetings per week. We write before we meet. We use Loom for async walkthroughs, Notion for specs, Gather for pairing, and Slack only for what's urgent or lightweight. We don't d