About ZOCA
Zoca’s AI-powered platform is scaling rapidly, and our customers expect every interaction—whether through web, mobile, or API—to be instantaneous, secure, and rock-solid. As the VP Engineering, you will collaborate with the CTO to transform big product bets into systems that are reliable, cost-efficient, and developer-friendly. You'll be instrumental in ensuring security, infrastructure stability, and fostering a culture that values output, curiosity, and continuous delivery.
What You’ll Do
- Shape Architecture End-to-End: Guide architectural decisions across our Nx-NestJS based monorepo, React/Next.js web apps, and React Native mobile apps. Ensure consistency, scalability, low latency, and high reliability.
- Champion Security & Compliance: Promote a secure-by-default approach in coding. Enforce practices like least-privilege IAM, automated dependency checks, and regular threat modelling. Manage audit and customer trust programs without compromising delivery speed.
- Own Infrastructure & Reliability: Design and manage highly available services using AWS ECS/Fargate, Lambda, and edge networks. Instrument services with metrics, tracing, and alerting. Lead blameless incident response and ensure continuous improvement of infrastructure reliability.
- Drive Cost Leadership: Foster a FinOps mindset within the team. Focus on right-sizing workloads, optimizing build vs. buy decisions, and making cost a first-class consideration during every design review.
- Scale a High-Impact Team: Hire and mentor engineers with a T-shaped skillset who are excited about AI. Promote best practices such as clear documentation, automated tests, design docs, and peer reviews.
- Refine Lean Processes: Improve the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) by evolving processes built on RFCs, trunk-based development, CI/CD gates, and explicit SLOs. Partner with Product and Design teams to deliver small, valuable releases efficiently.
Essential Skills & Competencies
Backend Expertise
- Deep proficiency in TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, and SQL/NoSQL data modeling.
- Experience designing event-driven architectures and microservices using queues and streams.
- Knowledge of caching, observability, performance tuning, and graceful degradation strategies.
Frontend Mastery
- Expertise in React, Next.js, and React Native (including state management, Redux Toolkit / React Query).
- Understanding of accessibility, performance optimization, and CI for Web Vitals.
- Familiarity with modern build tools like Vite, Webpack, Nx, and component-driven development.
Cloud & DevOps
- Hands-on experience with AWS services (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CDK).
- Solid understanding of containerization, CI/CD pipelines, blue-green/canary deployments, and automated rollback strategies.
Security Leadership
- Proven ability to integrate OWASP guidelines, SAST/DAST tooling, secrets management, and zero-trust networking.
- Comfort with leading incident response, root-cause analysis, and implementing preventive controls.
People & Culture
- A leader who sets clear expectations, provides candid coaching, and celebrates outcomes over heroics.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to align engineers, designers, and go-to-market teams around shared goals.
Business Acumen
- Ability to weigh engineering decisions against customer impact, delivery risk, and unit economics.
- Comfortable presenting trade-offs and influencing stakeholders in product, finance, and leadership.
What You Can Expect
- A seat at the table with the CTO to shape the product vision, architecture, and team rituals.
- The opportunity to work on a product with real traction and a clear path to category leadership.
A maker-centric culture that prioritizes deep work, experimentation, and rapid learning from data.
Skills: rds,sast,react,terraform,nestjs,react native,owasp,aws ecs,s3,design,cloudfront,api gateway,api,fargate,dynamodb,nosql,leadership,lambda,web,sql,ci/cd,typescript,next.js,node.js,dast
