Location: Remote (EMEA) · Germany/Munich preferred - CET/CEST timezone
Hi — I'm Grigory, Co-Founder and CTO at Secfix. How do you feel about shipping features yourself in the first month, building the hiring process in the second, and coaching engineers to get measurably better in the third and staying close to building longterm? If that sounds like the right order — strong engineer first, manager second — read on.
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 confident — and they can do that because they've been through the hard technical problems themselves.
At Secfix, I've been doing the engineering management work: 1:1s, hiring, design reviews, performance conversations since we started. The team is five engineers and a product designer. They're great, they work hard, and they ship. But I'm spread across too many things, and certain areas aren't getting the attention they deserve.
I need someone to take this on. Not as a delegator, but as the strongest individual contributor on the team who also happens to lead it.
You'll work directly with me and make huge impact on the engineering culture and our customers.
— Grigory
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 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 European market leadership.
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.
This isn't a role where you show up and start running standups. There are no standups. Here's how we think about the first months:
Month 1: Become a strong IC. Get into the codebase, ship a meaningful feature, and prove to yourself and the team that you can build at the level we need. You don't need to be the best senior engineer on day one, but you should be onboarded and delivering high-quality work fast enough that you can credibly help others improve. Expect to spend 70–80% of your time writing code.
Month 2: Own hiring. Beyond continued IC contributions, take over engineering interviews and build a better technical interview process. The current setup depends too many people. You'll design technical challenges, run screens, and make hiring more consistent and repeatable. This matters — we're planning to double the team in the next 12 months.
Month 3: Start leading. Help design a pragmatic way to evaluate team performance — simple, measurable, not bureaucratic. Start doing more regular 1:1s with each team member, focused on three things: output x impact, quality, and AI efficiency. Identify who's behind and help them improve. Remove obstacles from top performers.
Over time, the balance shifts. Coding goes from 70% to 10–20%. Hiring becomes the plurality of your work, we’ll grow the team from 5 engineers to 9 in the next months (50–70% during active hiring, 20–30% after). Mentorship and process improvement grow as the team grows. But you never fully stop building — you stay in the code enough to have credible technical judgment. I see this pattern across all our best leaders, from Lead CSM to Lead GTM.
In addition to management work, here are examples of projects you'll work on in the next months:
Own system design on our biggest projects. You're not picking up a ticket, you're writing the technical spec, presenting the architecture, getting alignment, and driving it to production. And leaving the system in a state the team can own.
Scale the product for mid-market. As we land larger customers, holding companies running compliance across subsidiaries, we need more granular RBAC, sub-workspace collaboration, and new control layers. You'll help build what makes that possible.
Push the AI product forward. We're moving from "we use AI in our tooling" to "we ship AI to customers." You'll help define the backend architecture for agentic compliance workflows, intelligent evidence collection, and context-aware policy generation.
Bring AI-assisted engineering to the whole team. You're genuinely curious about how AI tooling is changing the way we build — and you share that curiosity openly. You try new tools, figure out what works, and bring the rest of the team along. Not through formal sessions, but through the natural back-and-forth of working together day to day.
When something breaks in production, some managers think: "We need a better incident response runbook. Let's create an on-call rotation. Let's add a post-mortem template." They reach for systems and documentation.
The person we're looking for thinks: "Who on the team has the most context on this service? Is someone blocked or can they jump in? Let me get the right two people talking to each other." They reach for individuals and their capabilities. This comes once you solved the problem, not before.
This matters more to us than almost anything else. At five engineers, we don't need a rigid process. We need someone who knows exactly what each person is good at, what they're struggling with, and how to get the best out of them today — not after implementing a framework.
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 do status theatre. We wrote about our thoughtful communication and our remote culture, give it a read.
To drive it home, here's a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over a year:
Small, temporary teams. A designer and two engineers. A backend engineer and a CS person. The group forms around the problem, ships, and dissolves. No standing squads, no permanent team structures — at least not yet. The people closest to the problem usually shape the solution.
AI is already part of the craft. We use Claude for product design exploration and spec drafting. Engineers work in Cursor with encoded skills and rules that live in the codebase — component patterns, folder structure, architecture choices, and the path from Figma to Angular code. AI checks code against architecture rules before human review. We have a dedicated design QA skill that compares Figma against coded output. We don't use AI to lower the bar, we use it to reach the bar faster with more iterations behind us. In case you’re interested, we wrote a piece about it here.
Zero-bugs. We take this seriously - this helps us to gain customer trust faster. Especially serious customer-facing problems don't sit in a backlog competing with roadmap work. Critical issues get fixed immediately. High-severity within 48 hours. Every bug has an owner. Weekly quality review as part of Monday planning. Quality as identity, in compliance, being correct isn't a nice-to-have, it's the entire value proposition. We care about edge cases, data integrity, and getting the details right. Customers notice the speed and p