The Role
Lead global engineering for a Java-based, in-memory real-time data platform. Define technical strategy, drive roadmap delivery, ensure system quality and resilience, steward open-source/commercial balance, grow a distributed engineering organization, and engage with customers and developer community to advance product and ecosystem.
Summary Generated by Built In
What We Are Looking For
WHAT YOU’LL DO
II. Open Source Software Leadership
WHAT YOU HAVE
BENEFITS
About
The world's largest leading companies trust Hazelcast and its unified real-time data platform to take instant action on streaming data. With a stream processing engine and fast data store integrated into a single solution, businesses can simplify real-time architectures for next-gen applications and AI/ML departments to drive new revenue, mitigate risk, and operate efficiently - at a low TCO. To learn more about Hazelcast, or to join our community of CXOs, architects, and developers at brands such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Volvo, New York Life, Domino's, and others, visit hazelcast.comEqual Opportunities at HazelcastWe welcome people from all backgrounds, ethnicities, races, religions, gender, sexual identities, abilities, and personal circumstances, in a spirit of inclusivity and belonging.We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer, and believe we see strength in diversity. If you require any accommodation to assist you in the interview process, please submit this with your application.We offer competitive salaries with a flexible, empathetic and highly collaborative working environment. If you are motivated by the prospect of a career with a forward-thinking tech company, we'd love to hear from you.
We are seeking an experienced, inspirational Vice President of Engineering to lead our global engineering function. They will be responsible for defining and executing the technical strategy, leading the organisation, and ensuring the quality, performance, and resilience of our Java open-source based in-memory Real-Time Data Platform. This role requires a leader who is both a strategic planner and hands-on manager of world-class engineering teams.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
I. Technical Strategy & Product Delivery
- Product Strategy & Roadmap Co-Ownership: Collaborate with Product Management to define, prioritize, and drive the technical direction of the product roadmap, ensuring engineering input enhances technical execution, architectural quality, commercial value, differentiated packaging, and timely delivery through agile processes.
- Roadmap Execution: Drive, own and manage end-to-end engineering delivery against the product roadmap, utilising agile methodologies to ensure rapid, predictable, and high-quality releases.
- Quality & Resilience: Maintain and continuously elevate world-class standards for system quality, performance, security, and resilience across the entire platform.
- Technical Expertise: Provide oversight for core technical domains, including distributed systems, high-performance Java, concurrency, streaming/stream processing, and data structures.
II. Open Source Software Leadership
- Open Source Stewardship: Steward Hazelcast’s open-source core with a strong commitment to transparency, stability, and long-term compatibility, ensuring community trust while advancing enterprise capabilities.
- Open Source/Commercial Balance: Balance the needs of commercial customers with the expectations of a global, user-led open-source community, making principled decisions about feature placement, deprecations, and roadmap visibility.
- Community Feedback: Convert high-volume user feedback from diverse production environments into clear engineering priorities, ensuring the OSS platform remains robust, predictable, and widely adoptable.
- Ecosystem: Maintain disciplined reliability across Hazelcast’s multi-language client ecosystem and seamless upgrades for all users.
- Superior Developer and Operator Experience: Champion exceptional developer and operator experience, driving documentation quality, release clarity, and community engagement to strengthen Hazelcast’s ecosystem.
- Global People Leadership: Lead, motivate, and manage a highly distributed, global engineering team, fostering a people-centric managerial approach and an aggressive, collaborative engineering culture. The majority of our Engineers are based in the UK with smaller teams across EMEA.
- Culture & Ethos: Instill a strong product-led, innovation ethos within the company, guiding engineering teams to imagine the product primarily as a customer acquisition and value-delivery tool.
- Organizational Design: Evolve and optimize the organisational structure for maximum performance, resilience, scalability, and ownership.
- Talent Acquisition & Planning: Involvement in headcount planning to ensure a right-sized, highly skilled, and diverse global engineering organisation.
- Managerial Development: Identify, coach, mentor, and develop engineering managers within the organisation, creating clear career paths for both technical and managerial career tracks.
- Performance Management: Ensure teams are empowered and aligned with company goals, providing frequent, actionable, and constructive feedback to support personal development and measure team outcomes.
- Field Engagement: On occasion and with key customers, partner with Sales for critical field training, enablement, and some customer-facing activity, serving as a technical representative for the company.
- Developer Relations: Inspire and engage advanced developers globally, encouraging contributions to our open-source projects and fostering a vibrant technical community.
WHAT YOU HAVE
- Executive Leadership: 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years operating at the VP and/or director level, preferably in a B2B enterprise software or platform company. Demonstrated experience fostering a product-led culture and driving commercial results through engineering excellence.
- Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep, hands-on understanding of complex architectures, concurrent, distributed systems, high-performance compute, and real-time data architectures.
- Open Source Software Expertise: Excel at balancing open-source community expectations with enterprise requirements, maintaining rigorous public API discipline, documentation standards, and governance practices. Experience nurturing a global developer and operator community- across polyglot clients, cloud-native deployments, and hybrid environments.
- Global Team Management: Proven track record of successfully leading a geographically distributed, international engineering organisation.
- Technical Depth: A strong foundation in the core technologies relevant to the Hazelcast platform including Java, concurrency, networking, data streaming, SQL, distributed data stores, data grids. Ideally recent experience and an appetite to be hands on in development especially using java based technologies.
- Agile and Delivery: Expertise in modern agile methodologies and continuous delivery pipelines, focused on delivering product capabilities rapidly and reliably.
- Customer-Centric/Team Aligner: Comfortable working backward from the customer and working in an “open-kitchen,” GTM aligned environment.
- Entrepreneurial Spirit: The ability to approach the engineering function as a startup within the larger company, constantly seeking ways to innovate and improve.
- Communication: Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills, capable of communicating complex technical strategy to both internal teams (engineering, product) and external stakeholders (customers, analysts, board).
- Influence: Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries, driving alignment between Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
BENEFITS
- 25 days Annual Leave + Bank Holidays + Quarterly Wellbeing Days
- Group Company Pension Plan
- Private Medical Insurance
- Private Dental Insurance
- Life Insurance
- EAP (Employee Assistance Program)
About
The world's largest leading companies trust Hazelcast and its unified real-time data platform to take instant action on streaming data. With a stream processing engine and fast data store integrated into a single solution, businesses can simplify real-time architectures for next-gen applications and AI/ML departments to drive new revenue, mitigate risk, and operate efficiently - at a low TCO. To learn more about Hazelcast, or to join our community of CXOs, architects, and developers at brands such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Volvo, New York Life, Domino's, and others, visit hazelcast.comEqual Opportunities at HazelcastWe welcome people from all backgrounds, ethnicities, races, religions, gender, sexual identities, abilities, and personal circumstances, in a spirit of inclusivity and belonging.We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer, and believe we see strength in diversity. If you require any accommodation to assist you in the interview process, please submit this with your application.We offer competitive salaries with a flexible, empathetic and highly collaborative working environment. If you are motivated by the prospect of a career with a forward-thinking tech company, we'd love to hear from you.
Skills Required
- 10+ years progressive leadership in software engineering with at least 5 years at VP or director level
- Deep, hands-on expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, high-performance compute, and real-time data architectures
- Strong technical depth in Java and related technologies (networking, data streaming, SQL, distributed data stores, data grids)
- Experience stewarding open-source projects and balancing OSS community needs with enterprise product requirements
- Proven experience leading geographically distributed, international engineering organisations
- Proven ability to define and execute technical strategy and deliver product roadmaps using agile methodologies
- Expertise with continuous delivery pipelines (CI/CD) and practices for rapid, reliable releases
- Strong customer-facing and communication skills to work with Sales, customers, and developer communities
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline
- Entrepreneurial mindset, ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and develop engineering managers
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The Company
What We Do
Hazelcast is the leading in-memory computing platform company which addresses the growing demand for enhanced application performance, speed and scalability. Hazelcast’s in-memory computing platform is comprised of two core products: Hazelcast IMDG and Jet. Hazelcast IMDG is an in-memory data grid built and proven to provide the performance at scale required by the world’s largest organizations. Hazelcast Jet, is an ultra-fast, application embeddable, stream and batch processing engine capable of supporting real-time streaming data. The company also offers Hazelcast Cloud, a fully managed, low latency data layer for cloud-based workloads at any scale. Hazelcast’s customers include six of the world’s 10 largest banks and 36 of the Fortune Global 500; its technology is deployed at nearly every major credit card company, five of the world’s largest e-commerce companies and four of the largest telecommunications companies.
