Vice President, Engineering

About The Role

Rocket Loans is a fast-moving fintech built on the belief that personal lending should be simple, transparent, and fast. We're part of the Rocket Companies family — which means we have access to proven infrastructure and the culture of a smaller, focused organization. Our product, engineering, and design team is ~60 people strong, and we're building the infrastructure and experiences that define what modern consumer lending looks like.

We're at an inflection point. We've proven our core product. Now we're investing in the engineering organization itself — maturity, craft, career growth, and the kind of technical foundation that lets us move faster and build better. This is the role that leads that.

We're looking for a VP of Engineering to own the health, direction, and output of our engineering organization at Rocket Loans — across origination, checkout, servicing, and infrastructure. You'll report directly to the Head of Product & Engineering and partner closely with product, design, data, and operations leadership to set the standard for how we build. This isn't a role for someone who wants to manage from a distance.

You'll be shaping how we hire, how we grow engineers, how we make technical decisions, and how we show up as an org to the rest of the business. You'll have real latitude — and real accountability. The right person has done this before in some form, is energized by the organizational side of engineering leadership (not just the technical side), and wants to leave a mark on a team that's ready to level up.

• Own the engineering org's execution — delivery quality, velocity, and predictability across all product pillars
• Build and maintain the systems that make great engineers want to stay: career ladders, promotion processes, L&D investments, and a culture of craft
• Partner with recruiting to raise the hiring bar and grow the team deliberately

• Establish and evolve our engineering standards, architectural principles, and platform strategy
• Make or facilitate the high-stakes technical decisions — and create the forums where good decisions get made at every level
• Own our approach to technical debt: when to pay it down, when to ship anyway, and how to be honest about tradeoffs

• Be the engineering voice in the room during product planning, roadmap reviews, and exec-level conversations
• Translate business context into engineering priorities — and engineering constraints into product reality
• Partner with data, ops, and compliance to ensure what we build is auditable, reliable, and regulatorily sound in a consumer lending context

• Drive the maturity initiatives that turn a good team into a great one: execution metrics, operational discipline, incident response, and engineering excellence programs
• Build the kind of feedback loops — retros, postmortems, metrics reviews — that make the org smarter over time
• Model the culture you want: direct, curious, collaborative, high-bar

• Lead our posture on AI-assisted development — not as a mandate, but as a discipline we build intentionally with the right foundations in place
• Partner with engineering leads to identify where AI tooling creates real leverage vs. where it creates risk
• Help set the standard for what responsible, effective AI adoption looks like in a regulated fintech

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering teams at meaningful scale
• Genuinely technical — you can engage at the architecture level, hold your own in system design conversations, and earn credibility with engineers by understanding the work, not just managing it
• Hands‑on familiarity with our core stack or close equivalents:
  Type Script/Node.js, NestJS or similar backend frameworks, Next.js, Postgre
  
  SQL, AWS infrastructure
• Experience navigating platform modernization or migration programs — you know what it takes to move off legacy systems without halting product delivery
• Experience owning engineering culture and org health — not just shipping product
• Strong track record of building and growing senior…