VP/Head of Engineering (all genders)

Full technical ownership of Rocket — reporting directly to the founders, with no layer in between. Engineering, end-to-end: Architecture, system design, delivery against the roadmap, reliability, technical debt. Backend, frontend, DevOps, QA, and the AI/Data team all roll up to you. You set lightweight processes that let a small team ship fast without breaking things. An AI-enabled engineering pipeline: You make the engineering organization itself AI-native: agentic coding workflows, AI-assisted review and testing, automation of everything repetitive. AI as a core system capability: You architect the integration of LLMs and agentic workflows into production systems: deterministic logic combined with AI-generated outputs, with real validation, fallbacks, and reliability strategies. The team: Hire, mentor, scale. You inherit a strong small team and grow it into a high-performance engineering organization with a culture of ownership and speed. Product and business alignment: You work directly with the founders and Product. You challenge requirements, simplify complexity, and connect engineering work to outcomes: revenue, automation, customer impact.

What success looks like:

• 6 months: Delivery is predictable, the AI-enabled dev pipeline is running, and the team has grown with A-players you hired.
• 12 months: The platform scales with US enterprise customers, core systems are reliable and observable, and engineering is a competitive advantage — not a bottleneck.

Honestly: This is full accountability with no net above it. No CTO layer to make or catch decisions — the architecture, the team, and everything that ships are yours. If you want a role where someone above you sets direction, this isn't it. If you want exactly that ownership, it is.

• 10+ years of software engineering, 5+ in an engineering leadership role at high-growth product companies.
• Strong hands-on backend or full-stack background — you can still go deep.
• Proven experience scaling engineering teams at growing startups.
• Strong architecture expertise: APIs, distributed systems, event-driven design, cloud.
• LLM / agentic AI systems in production — and genuine conviction that engineering itself should be AI-assisted.
• Product mindset: you connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, speed, and full accountability.

Nice to have, not required: Background in hospitality tech, CRM, PMS, or revenue management. Enterprise integration experience (Salesforce, Oracle OPERA Cloud, Microsoft Graph API). Experience leading distributed, international teams.

We offer

• Work with real AI technology at international level — not as a pilot project, but as our business model.
• Genuine room to shape things. Your ideas do not land in a suggestion box; they land in the next iteration.
• A short path to the management team. Decisions take days, not committee rounds.
• Growth you are part of. We are building the company’s next chapter — with roles, responsibility and prospects that did not exist a year ago.
• Leipzig as your primary base, with regular time in the office and flexible remote work. Hybrid models are everyday practice here, not the exception.
• Permanent contract, full-time.
• Performance bonuses for demonstrable results.
• Multi-day team events in places that are actually fun.