VP of Engineering

Summary

Bounce is a fast-moving travel startup building the world's largest luggage storage network - think "cloud storage, but for the physical world." It connects travelers with 30,000+ local businesses for short-term baggage storage across the globe. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Sapphire, we've already served 3M+ users and stored 10M+ bags. Now it's time to scale the engineering team from 25 to 50+, and we need a VP of Engineering to own that journey.

What You'll Be Working On

• Shipping product - owning the roadmap end-to-end, from sprint planning to incident response, and making sure we deliver on time and at quality.

• Growing the team - hiring ~10–15 engineers in your first year, personally closing senior hires, and building our engineering brand externally.

• Coaching managers - developing four existing engineering managers into stronger leaders, making the tough hire/level/exit calls, and building a bench for what's next.

• Partnering with Product & Design - roadmap, prioritisation, and scope trade-offs happen together. You push back when the scope is wrong and absorb it when it isn't.

• Being the engineering voice on the leadership team - making trade-offs visible, communicating across the org, and representing engineering externally.

• Working hand-in-hand with the CTO - they own architecture, AI, and platform; you bring the delivery lens and help shape direction so the team ships faster.

What They're Looking For

• You've led an engineering org of 25+ people, ideally through a growth phase (25→50 or 50→100). Not your first rodeo.

• 3+ years as a manager of managers - actual EMs reporting to you, not just senior ICs.

• Strong technical foundation - you can review a system design and push back on architecture. You haven't drifted away from the tech.

• You personally recruit and close senior engineers. Hiring is core to your job, not something you delegate.

• You thrive alongside a hands-on technical CTO - ego-free, and you make them better by taking the right things off their plate.

• Speed is a feature. You bring judgment, not a 50-page process playbook.

• Marketplace, consumer, or physical-world ops experience is a strong plus. Same if you've worked somewhere known for shipping fast (Linear, Ramp, Stripe, Vercel, GitHub, DoorDash, etc.).

• You're based in Lisbon or willing to relocate - this is mainly an in-office role.

Why This Opportunity?

You'd be joining at an inflection point. Bounce is a profitable, venture-backed company named the fastest-growing travel company in the USA (Inc5000, 2024), sitting on a massive marketplace with real traction and a clear path to scale. You won't be building from scratch; you'll inherit a sharp, senior-loaded team and a working product. What you will do is help take it to the next level - shaping the growth, how we ship, and who we become as an engineering org. If you want ownership, autonomy, and the chance to build something meaningful in travel, this is it.