Senior Director of Engineering, Platform

<div class="content-intro"><h2><strong>Brief info about Vinted&nbsp;</strong></h2> <p data-renderer-start-pos="1"><span data-sheets-root="1">Our mission is to make second-hand the first choice, and we're looking for people who want to help us get there. Every day, we work together to help our members buy and sell pre-loved clothing and lifestyle items, giving each piece a second life – or even a third. <br>The Vinted Group is made up of three business units that support this mission:<br><br><strong><a href="https://careers.vinted.com/marketplace" target="_blank">Vinted Marketplace</a></strong> is Europe’s leading platform for second-hand fashion and a go-to destination for all kinds of pre-loved items, with a growing range of categories. Our platform connects millions of members across 20+ markets, helping great items find a new life.<br><br><a href="https://careers.vinted.com/vintedgo" target="_blank"><strong>Vinted Go</strong></a> enhances the shipping experience with a vast network of over 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points, partnering with more than 60 carriers across Europe, with added services like item verification for peace of mind on high-value pieces.<br><br><a href="https://careers.vinted.com/vintedpay" target="_blank"><strong>Vinted Pay</strong></a> is the newest part of the Vinted Group, dedicated to bringing secure, reliable payments to buyers and sellers across Europe. Seamlessly integrated into the Vinted app, it helps keep every transaction safe, efficient, and easy for our members.<br><br>Founded in 2008 in Lithuania, Vinted began as a way for friends to find new homes for clothes they no longer needed. In 2019, we became Lithuania's first unicorn! Today, our headquarters remain in Vilnius, and we've grown with offices across Europe, supported by a team of over 2,000 people.&nbsp;</span></p></div><h2><strong>Information about the position&nbsp;</strong></h2> <p>We’ve recently created a Platform organization to accelerate product delivery across an engineering organization of 900+ people and multiple business units. <strong>We are looking for a Senior Director of Engineering to build, lead, and evolve this Platform</strong>.&nbsp;</p> <p>This role will own the end-to-end strategy, execution, and impact of Platform across the entire technology stack: from foundational infrastructure to frameworks, architectural patterns, and developer workflows.</p> <p>The Senior Director of Engineering (Platform) will report to the CTO and will be a core member of the engineering leadership team (ELT). ELT consists of product engineering leaders (in Marketplace, Vinted Go, and Payments), a security leader, a Principal Engineer, and the Principal Technical Program Manager.</p> <p><strong>The mission of the Platform org and its leader</strong> is to enable product teams to move faster with higher quality by providing opinionated golden paths, standardized architectural patterns, and platform capabilities that are deeply aligned with our business domains.</p> <p>The Platform must support multiple business units (Marketplace, Payments, Vinted Go) operating at different sizes and patterns, while maintaining coherence and leverage across the stack.</p> <p>The Platform is an opinionated internal product organization (consisting of 180+ people) whose primary customer is the product engineer and whose primary outcome is faster, safer, more consistent delivery of business value. This organization has been born recently, so the person in this role will explicitly need to own the shift from:</p> <ul> <li>Utility Provider → Platform Steward</li> <li>“We shipped the tool” → “The organization is using it well”</li> <li>Raw infrastructure + fragmented product logic → coherent, layered abstractions</li> <li>Availability metrics → engineering effectiveness metrics</li> </ul> <p>The Senior Director is expected to have the mandate and credibility to drive these changes. It’s expected that this shift would happen within 12-24 months, and then the Platform org and what it provides would continue to evolve and improve after the shift.</p> <h2><strong>In this position, you’ll&nbsp;</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Define and continuously evolve a clear Platform vision, strategy, and operating model that spans infrastructure, frameworks, and higher-level abstractions.</li> <li>Establish Platform as a curated internal product, not a utility service.</li> <li>Clearly articulate what Platform owns, what Product teams own, and how responsibilities shift across abstraction layers.</li> <li>Own adoption, evolution, and migration strategies for platform capabilities, including driving and sequencing change across product teams.</li> <li>Build and lead the Platform organization, likely needing to change its shape as the shift from Infrastructure happens over the years.</li> <li>Hire, develop, and retain senior engineering leaders and staff-level engineers within Platform.</li> <li>Foster a culture of strong product thinking, accountability, and stewardship.</li> <li>Act as a senior partner to Product Engineering leaders.</li> <li>Establish clear engagement models between Platform and Product teams, including prioritization, funding, and decision-making.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>About you&nbsp;</strong></h2> <ul> <li>12+ years of engineering experience, including significant time leading large, multi-team engineering organizations.</li> <li>Proven experience building or operating internal platforms or developer-facing infrastructure at scale.</li> <li>Strong understanding of distributed systems, modern cloud infrastructure, and software architecture.</li> <li>Track record of driving non-trivial change and adoption at scale.</li> <li>Experience working closely with product organizations and senior business stakeholders.</li> <li>Comfort operating in ambiguity and shaping new organizational models.</li> <li>Ability to think in systems and understand how organizational design, incentives, and architecture interact.</li> <li>Ability to interact and be trusted by technical leaders and senior engineers, as well as product leaders.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Work perks&nbsp; </strong></h2> <ul> <li>The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme</li> <li>30 days of paid annual leave</li> <li>Newest MacBook models</li> <li>Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family</li> <li>Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to €540 for home workplace furniture</li> <li>A daily lunch allowance</li> <li>Frequent team-building events</li> <li>A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted</li> <li>A subsidised gym membership with ClassPass or Urban Sports Club</li> <li>A subsidised pension plan provided by Vinted</li> <li>Hallesche Supplemental health insurance</li> <li>Life and disability insurance provided</li> <li>A subsidised Deutschlandticket</li> <li>The opportunity to spend up to 90 days per year - 21 of which can be spent working outside of the EU - on workation</l