VP Software Engineering

About Us

At Nextlane, we don’t just develop software solutions – we create the future of the automotive industry.

We are a company that combines advanced technology with a clear vision: simplifying and digitizing every step of the automotive customer journey, empowering manufacturers and dealerships to thrive in a constantly evolving market.

We believe in the value of every team member, offering opportunities for you to develop and contribute to meaningful solutions.

So… What does it mean to be a #Nextlaner?

• Be part of a growth-oriented culture.

• Collaborate with colleagues from all over the world.

• Believe in the Power of ideas and the diversity of thought.

• Be committed to provide an environment where you can learn, grow, and collaborate on projects that make a global impact.

Our success is measured not just by results, but also by the growth and satisfaction of those who are part of our company.

At Nextlane, you’ll have the opportunity to innovate, push boundaries, and work on solutions that are transforming the automotive world.

🚀 The Mission

Nextlane builds the software that runs automotive retail across 14 countries, with more than 60 manufacturer integrations. Today that runs on around ten legacy dealer management systems, built over three decades in technologies that are now at the end of their life.

We are replacing them with a single cloud platform, and we are building it with AI at the centre: both in how our engineers work, and in what our customers get. Our AI products are already live and generating revenue, and they are the fastest growing part of our portfolio.

You will lead the engineering organisation that builds all of it: the cloud product portfolio, the single platform that replaces the legacy estate, and the AI products we sell to dealers and manufacturers.

This is a build job, not a caretaking job. The legacy estate keeps running while you build what replaces it, so you will be making hard sequencing calls about what gets migrated, what gets rewritten and what gets left alone, with real customers on the other side of every one of them.

🎯 Your Responsibilities

You will be responsible for:

• Engineering strategy and delivery. Defining and executing the engineering strategy for the cloud product portfolio, aligned to the company strategy and the product vision, and owning delivery, scalability, reliability and operational excellence.

• An engineering organisation of around 30 people, led through Engineering Managers, with Principal and Staff Engineers on the technical track. Building and scaling those teams across several product domains, and developing the leaders inside them.

• The AI product portfolio. The engineering capability, evaluation discipline, reliability and unit cost model that let us ship customer-facing AI features safely and repeatedly, including ownership of the Skywalker team.

• Agentic development. Driving our agentic development operating model inside your organisation. We have standardised on Claude Code for all engineers, with autonomy gated by a defined AI fluency scale. You will take this from adoption to measured delivery outcomes, and contribute to how it works across the company.

• Architectural coherence. Working with our Architecture Practice and our Platform engineering team so that we ship one platform rather than several that resemble each other.

What success looks like

• The single platform has a credible, sequenced delivery plan, with the first migrated modules live with real customers rather than in pilot.

• Agentic development is measurably changing throughput and quality in your teams, with the numbers to prove it rather than anecdotes.

• Shipped further customer-facing AI capabilities to production, with an evaluation and cost model you can defend to the executive team.

• Your leadership bench is strong enough that the organisation runs without you in the middle of it.

🕵️ What We’re Looking For

These are the requirements that decide this hire. We will probe each one with specific evidence, so please come prepared with examples.

1. You have led a real agentic development transformation, not a tooling rollout.

You have taken an engineering organisation from AI-assisted coding to agentic delivery, and you changed the operating model to match: how work is decomposed, what the definition of done is, how code review and testing hold up when generated volume goes up, and how you measured whether any of it worked. We will ask what broke, what you changed, and what the numbers did.

2. You have shipped AI features to paying customers.

Production features built on models, not internal productivity tooling and not a prototype. That means evaluation harnesses, failure modes and hallucination posture, latency and unit cost per interaction, human in the loop design, data protection, and the conversations with legal and with customers about what the system is allowed to do. You know what you would build differently now.

3. You lead through managers, and you are still technical.

You have run an engineering organisation of around 30 to 50 people or larger, through Engineering Managers or Directors, across more than one product domain, and you have hired and developed those leaders. You are also credible in an architecture review: you can read the design, ask the question that exposes the weak assumption, and disagree with a Principal Engineer on the substance. We are not looking for a leader who has stopped engaging with the technology.

4. You communicate exceptionally well.

Fluent English, which is our working language and the language of the interview process. You can hold a room of engineers and a room of executives on the same subject and be equally clear in both, explain a technical trade-off in business terms without diluting it, and write well enough that a decision survives contact with a distributed organisation. A large part of this role is alignment across countries, functions and levels, so this is not a soft requirement.

6. You have built cloud-native B2B SaaS at scale.

Multi-tenant products with real reliability and scalability requirements, distributed and international teams, and a product-led organisation where engineering partners with Product rather than receiving specifications from it. You are fluent in cloud platforms, distributed systems and modern software delivery, and you can judge those decisions even where you are not hands-on.

Strong advantages

• Experience in a private equity backed environment, and comfort with the reporting rhythm and capital discipline that comes with it.

• Domain exposure to automotive, mobility, retail, fintech, telecommunications or another integration-heavy enterprise SaaS sector.

• A second European language: French, Spanish, Portuguese or German.

• Experience leading a small, high-autonomy innovation team alongside a larger delivery organisation.

Our Recruitment Process

1. 30-minute introductory call with our Talent Acquisition team.

2. Interview with the CTPO.

3. Engineering Leadership interview.

4. Executive Leadership interview.

5. Final Executive conversation.

What We Offer:

We understand that flexibility and trust are essential for our teams. Here are some of the benefits we offer:

• 🏡 Hybrid Work: Rotational model, 2 days onsite, three days remote.

• 💰 Annual Payments: 14 payments per year (12 monthly payments + 1 summer bonus + 1 Christmas bonus in November).

• 🍽️ Meal Voucher: €10.20 per working day.

• 🌴 Vacation: 23 vacation days, plus 24th or 31st December off.

• 🗣️ Language Training: Access to group classes in Spanish, English, or French.

• ⚕️ Private Medical Insurance: Multicare coverage.

• Teambuilding: Join us for memorable afterworks and team activities!

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging

At Nextlane, we are committed to creating a space where everyone feels valued and respected. We firmly believe that diversity in experiences and backgrounds strengthens our culture and drives innovation.

• Support for people with disabilities. If you need any adjustments during the recruitment process, let us know so we can provide the best possible experience.

• Equal opportunities for all: We welcome applications regardless of age, gender, origin, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Join Nextlane and become part of the technological revolution in the automotive industry.

Discover why we are a great place to develop your talent!