About Us

At Cognism, we deliver market leading AI-enabled, compliant business data and international sales intelligence, giving revenue teams the confidence to find, engage and win more customers. We’re on an transformative journey, evolving the company’s product offering and culture of collaboration, accountability, and drive for excellence. We are looking for a senior product engineering leader who can help scale the business to the next level. Our company strategy is to lead the European sales data market by delivering accurate and compliant sales data that seamlessly powers our tools and the workflows of mid-market and enterprise revenue teams in North America and Europe. Our product vision and customer promise is to deliver quality sales data you can't get anywhere else, delivered where and when you need it, helping you work smarter while giving you context and control.

As we grow and evolve, we need a technical leader who can inspire our teams and reflect our company values:

• We deeply understand our customers

• We own the outcome together
• We celebrate impact wherever it comes from

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive global workplace, which encourages you to achieve any goals you may have, while learning and growing along the way. For more information on Cognism’s intuitive sales intelligence platform, powered by world-class compliant data insights to help businesses grow in Europe, please visit www.cognism.com.

Role Overview

The VP of Product Engineering is responsible for leading Cognism’s global product engineering organization and setting the technical direction for the company’s core product platform. This role owns company-wide decisions around product technology, architecture, and engineering practices to ensure Cognism can operate, innovate, and scale reliably as the business grows.

As a member of the senior leadership team, you will partner closely with Product, Data, Design, and other executives to define and execute a long-term technical strategy that supports multiple product lines, high-growth customer demand, and increasing organizational complexity.

Key Responsibilities

• Own company-level product engineering strategy, including the technology stack, architecture, and engineering standards supporting scale, resilience, and sustainable evolution

• Lead architecture and platform decisions across a distributed product portfolio, balancing speed, quality, reliability, and cost at scale

• Design operating models and frameworks that enable multiple product teams and departments to deliver consistent, high-impact customer solutions across regions and markets

• Partner with Data, Product, Design, and executive leadership to align technical strategy with the product vision, commercial priorities, and long-term business objectives

• Build and evolve a multi-layered product engineering organization, including leadership structures, tools and processes that enable effective, efficient collaboration, technical scoping and delivery, as well as career frameworks that scale with the company

• Set expectations and drive improvements of engineering excellence across availability, performance, quality, delivery predictability, security, and compliance Develop senior engineering leaders, ensuring strong succession planning, leadership depth, and organizational resilience

• Drive large-scale delivery and transformation initiatives, including platform modernization, architectural evolution, and cross-team technical change
• Represent product engineering at the executive and board level, providing clarity on technical trade-offs, investment needs, and risk

What We’re Looking For

• Significant experience leading large, multi-team product engineering organizations in high-growth or enterprise environments

• A pragmatic leader that focuses on building relationships and delivery quality, instead of being dogmatic about frameworks.

• Proven expertise in scalable, distributed systems, modern cloud architectures, and platform-based product development

• A proven ability to operate at the intersection of business strategy and technical execution

• Experience designing engineering organizations and processes that scale across nearly 100 engineers, as well as a similarly sized data team who operates as a peer organization, alongside other parts of the R&D org including product and design.

• Strong track record of building leadership capability and sustainable engineering cultures

• Executive-level communication and influencing skills, including board-level engagement
• A pragmatic, systems-level thinker with a strong customer and outcomes focus

Must haves

• Product-centric technical leadership: Owns the technical execution of customer-facing products across web applications (Companion/Enrich), our Chrome Extension, and DaaS (API/bulk). Translates product strategy into scalable, reliable technical systems and services that deliver consistent customer value.

• Delivery excellence and execution discipline: Builds a culture of accountability, predictability, and continuous improvement. Establishes strong engineering practices around planning, technical scoping and estimation, QA, release management, and incident response – balancing speed with quality and reliability. Clearly communicates tradeoffs between scope, timeline, and technical risk to enable strong product decision-making and nimble resource management across squads.

• Architecture rigor and system design: Deep experience designing, evolving, and maintaining scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient systems. Demonstrates excellent judgment around abstraction boundaries, technical debt tradeoffs, and long-term maintainability, with a strong bias toward simplicity, reliability, and incremental improvement. Understands the importance of reliability in an enterprise SaaS business, as well as how to operationalize critical customer experiences like incident management protocols.

• AI and ML product delivery leadership: Hands-on experience delivering AI- and ML-enabled product features in production. Understands the end-to-end lifecycle – from data readiness and model integration to deployment, monitoring, and iteration – and can connect technical choices to real customer and business outcomes. Experience connecting data across AI ecosystems via MCP modern API ecosystems is a strong plus.

• Product and customer empathy: Deeply curious about customer problems and commercial impact. Partners tightly with Product, Data, and Design leadership to ensure technology choices accelerate learning, adoption, and revenue / churn reduction – not just technical outcomes.

• Applied data & analytics enablement (in partnership with VP Data who owns the analytics function): Strong understanding of modern data architectures and delivery patterns as they relate to product development. Able to partner closely with Data leadership to ensure product eng teams are building on trustworthy, well-governed, and discoverable data foundations that support analytics, ML-powered features, and experimentation.

• Security, reliability and compliance by design: Ensures security, privacy, and reliability are foundational to all product systems. Comfortable operating in environments with formal compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001) and embedding those practices into day-to-day engineering workflows rather than treating them as one-off exercises.

• Talent leadership and team development: Magnet for strong engineering talent. Attracts, develops, and retains strong product engineers. Builds teams with high ownership, strong craft, and healthy delivery habits. Raises the bar through hiring rigor, mentorship, clear expectations, and visible technical leadership.

• Platform evolution at scale: Proven experience leading meaningful platform evolution – such as modularization, service extraction, event-driven patterns, or cloud modernization – while maintaining delivery velocity and production stability.

• Experience scaling product engineering organizations and leading culture shifts: Has helped lead engineering teams through significant growth phases (scale-up, IPO readiness, or acquisition), and understands the operational rigor, planning maturity, and reliability expectations that come with that stage, understanding how to build and evolve a strong culture of innovation and collaboration.

• Global, distributed team leadership: Comfortable leading hybrid or fully remote teams across time zones in addition to a strong in-person office culture in our Croatia offices where most of our engineering teams are based. Creates alignment, momentum, and strong cross-team collaboration in distributed environments – understands when to leverage async comms vs when live discussions are best.

Nice to have

• Vendor & platform partnership leadership: Experience leading relationships with major cloud and platform providers (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure, data or AI platforms) to accelerate product delivery, manage cost, and reduce time-to-market – without over-indexing on vendor-driven architecture.

• Strategic technical partnerships: Has significantly contributed to or led initiatives where product engineering enabled strategic partnerships, integrations, or ecosystem plays that materially impacted growth.
• External technical leadership: Comfortable representing the product engineering organization with customers, partners, investors or at conferences. Able to communicate technical strategy in a clear, credible, and business-relevant way for external audiences (doing this internally is a must-have though).

Impact of the Role

The VP of Product Engineering will be a critical driver of Cognism’s ability to scale its platform, accelerate product innovation, and operate reliably at increasing levels of complexity. This role will shape the long-term technical foundation of the company and the effectiveness of engineering as a strategic function.