Socket

Socket

VP of Engineering

San Francisco · Vp

Sponsorship not specified$40k-$80kDetected 124 days ago
SwiftDistributed SystemsCode ReviewRESTFigmaSupply ChainCadenceLeadershipMentoring

About the role

  • 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.

Responsibilities

  • 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.
  • Own delivery on major cross-team initiatives. Define what success looks like, track progress weekly, manage dependencies, escalate risks early.
  • 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.
  • You care about culture as much as you care about execution. You believe that how you build is as important as what you build.
  • how do you stay fast and maintain code quality and culture while you scale from 40 to 80+ engineers?

Requirements

  • You can articulate what "good" looks like at each scale and why the things that worked at 40 people stop working at 100.
  • 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 have concrete examples of coordinating 4+ teams on major initiatives.
  • 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.

Nice to have

  • 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.
  • 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.

Compensation

  • Market competitive salary bands

Benefits

  • Our benefits are crafted to support you and your family, so you can take care of what matters most and thrive in and outside of work.
  • Meaningful equity program
  • Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage)
  • Flexible time-off, holidays, and winter shutdown to rest & recharge
  • Paid parental leave
  • Build a feedback culture where code review is learning and where architecture reviews strengthen decisions instead of slowing them down.

Company info

  • 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 https://socket.dev/love to see for yourself!)
  • Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross/, a long-time open source maintainer with software downloaded over a billion times a month, Socket has raised $ https://socket.dev/blog/series-b125M in funding https://socket.dev/blog/series-c 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?
  • 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 https://socket.dev/love to see for yourself!)
  • 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?
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This listing is sourced directly from Socket's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.