VP of Engineering at Bounce

💙 ABOUT BOUNCE... Bounce is building cloud storage for the physical world, starting with the largest global luggage storage network in existence. Bounce's marketplace connects travelers with 30,000+ small business locations worldwide for hyper-local short-term baggage storage. With more locations globally than Burger King, and more locations in New York City than Starbucks, Bounce has served 3M+ users, stored 10M+ bags, and paid over $10M to small business partners. To achieve this, Bounce is a fast-paced and scrappy team. We believe that experimentation fuels innovation, so we move quickly, testing new ideas and adapting in real time. If you're ready to make an impact in a high-energy, close-knit, and collaborative environment, Bounce is the place where you can move fast, think big, and shape the future of travel. Join us as we make the world a lighter, more accessible place! Bounce has been named the Inc5000's fastest-growing travel company in the USA in 2024 and is proudly backed by leading Silicon Valley investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Sapphire. (Learn more about Bounce's Series B HERE [Upgrade to PRO to see link] and our Japan expansion HERE [Upgrade to PRO to see link] ABOUT THE ROLE… As VP of Engineering, you'll own product delivery and engineering hiring at Bounce, partnering directly with our CTO to take Bounce from a 25-person engineering team that ships fast to a 50+ person org that ships even faster. You'll inherit a sharp, senior-loaded team across four engineering managers — and you'll be accountable for what we ship, how fast we ship it, and the people we develop while doing it. This is a successor role on the operational side of engineering. Our CTO has led engineering since 2021 and is now stepping out of the operational day-to-day. The CTO keeps a close grip on architecture, AI, and technical platform decisions; you take ownership of product delivery, the engineering org, hiring, and the partnership with Product and Design. You'll be the CTO's partner in that transition — managing through your EMs, building real partnerships with our Head of Product and Head of Design, and being the engineering voice on the leadership team. You'll be based in Lisbon, in-office, and report directly to the CTO. WHERE YOU COME IN… - Own product delivery end-to-end — be accountable for shipping the product roadmap on time and at quality. Run the planning, sprint, on-call, and incident-response cadences without the founder in the room. - Manage through managers — coach our four engineering managers into stronger leaders. Make the hire/level/exit calls. Build a bench so Bounce always has the next layer ready. - Own engineering hiring — personally close the senior hires. Hire ~10-15 strong engineers in year one. Own the engineering brand externally — talks, writing, and the candidate experience. - Be a deep partner to Product and Design — build real working partnerships with our Head of Product and Head of Design. Roadmap, prioritisation, and scope trade-offs are made together. Push back when scope is wrong; absorb it when it isn't. - Be a real exec — the engineering voice on the leadership team. Make trade-offs explicit, communicate up and across, and represent engineering externally. - Partner with our CTO on architecture, AI, and technical platform — those decisions stay with the CTO. You translate those bets into product-engineering execution, surface what product delivery needs from them to ship, and push back when platform direction creates friction. YOUR PROFILE… - You've led engineering organisations of at least 25 people, ideally through a 25→50 or 50→100 growth phase. This is not the first place you'll do this. - You've been a manager of managers for 3+ years — EMs reporting to you, not just senior ICs. - You have a strong technical foundation. You can review a system design, push back on an architectural decision, and earn trust from your Staff ICs. You haven't been promoted away from the technology. - You've personally recruited and closed senior engineers. You treat hiring as a primary part of the job, not something you delegate. - You're excited about being a successor to a hands-on technical founder. You can build a real partnership without ego, and you know how to make a founder-CTO better at their job by taking the right things off their plate. - You move fast and treat speed as a feature. You don't bring a 50-page process playbook — you bring judgment. - Marketplace, consumer, and physical-world operations experience is a strong plus. So is having been part of an engineering culture known for shipping (Linear, Ramp, Whatnot, Stripe, Figma, Anthropic, Vercel, GitHub, DoorDash). - You're based in Lisbon or willing to relocate — this is an in-office role.