Head of Engineering

What we're building

BlancVPN is a privacy product used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world — and behind it sits a fast-growing engineering organization that needs a clear technical center of gravity.

We're looking for a Head of Engineering to hold that center: to keep coherence across the entire system — product experience, backend services, delivery pipelines, and the engineering team behind them. This goes beyond strategy. You'll make the pivotal architectural decisions, drive execution, and stay hands-on in the codebase when the challenge demands it.

What we're looking for

Core Requirements

- Fluent Russian and English (B2+)
- 7+ years in engineering, including significant time building and leading teams
- Strong hands-on experience with production architecture and engineering operations
- Solid architectural judgment with Python in production systems
- Deep practical knowledge of PostgreSQL, Redis, and distributed systems
- Experience designing reliable release processes and CI/CD pipelines
- Confidence with Docker in both local and production environments
- Proven track record of hiring, mentoring, and elevating engineering teams
- Ability to switch fluidly between product strategy, system architecture, and execution
- Comfort working closely with founders, product managers, and design

Nice-to-have

- Strong system design instincts with a bias for pragmatic solutions
- Experience scaling an engineering organization through an early or growth stage
- Familiarity with the wider data and observability stack (e.g. ClickHouse, monitoring, alerting)
- Experience in privacy, security, or subscription products

What you'll be doing

Technical Direction

- Define and own the technical strategy across product systems, backend, infrastructure, and internal tools
- Translate product goals into clear engineering plans, managing priorities and tradeoffs
- Establish standards for architecture, code quality, testing, monitoring, and incident response
- Stay hands-on with code when critical architectural decisions require it

Team & Delivery

- Foster a culture of fast, reliable, and predictable product delivery
- Hire, mentor, and structure the engineering team to support sustainable growth
- Continuously improve development environments, deployment processes, and operational practices
- Collaborate with the executive team on company planning, resourcing, and tech-risk management

What we offer

🌍 Work from anywhere — fully remote (except Russia, Belarus, China, Syria, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, and some other regions)
🗓️ Flexible 5-day week — start when it suits you; loosely aligned to CET
💻 Full home-office setup — all the equipment you need, on us
🌴 40 flexible paid days off + paid sick leave
❤️ Benefits — VHI, wellness, language courses, mental health support and a referral program
📈 Room to grow — annual development budget + in-person team meet-ups.

Stages

👋 Welcome Call
📝 Take-Home
🛠️ Technical Call
🧩 Culture & Process Call
🤝 Pre-Offer Call