Vice President, Product Engineering
Location: Nine Elms, London
Working Pattern: Full-time, five days per week on-site
The Role
Zapp is looking for an exceptional product-minded engineering leader to shape and deliver the next generation of our platform.
As VP of Product Engineering, you will own how Zapp turns customer, operational, and commercial opportunities into high-quality products. You will work closely with the Founder and Executive Team to set priorities, shape solutions, and lead teams from idea through to launch and iteration.
This is not a role focused solely on managing an engineering organisation. We are looking for a hands-on leader who can move comfortably between product strategy, technical architecture, team leadership, and execution. You will be expected to get close to our customers and operations, challenge assumptions, make thoughtful trade-offs, and create the momentum required to ship valuable products quickly.
Alongside delivering products, you will build and scale a high-performing engineering function with strong standards for quality, reliability, pace, and ownership.
About Zapp
Zapp is London’s leading premium convenience retail platform. Founded in 2020, our vision is to reinvent the multi-trillion-dollar convenience retail market through best-in-class, customer-centric technology and fulfilment.
Zapp partners with some of the world’s leading brands to offer an exclusive, hand-picked range of products, available 24/7 and delivered in minutes
What You’ll Own
Product and Technology Direction
- Define Zapp’s product and technology direction in partnership with the Founder and Executive Team.
- Translate business priorities, customer needs, operational challenges, and data into a focused product and engineering roadmap.
- Identify the highest-value problems to solve and make clear trade-offs between speed, scope, quality, and technical investment.
- Ensure our architecture and technology choices support both near-term delivery and Zapp’s long-term ambitions.
- Product delivery
- Take accountability for turning ideas into products that are launched, adopted, measured, and continuously improved.
- Lead teams through discovery, solution design, development, launch, and iteration.
- Create a strong, repeatable delivery rhythm while remaining pragmatic and responsive to changing business needs.
- Remove obstacles, accelerate decision-making, and ensure important initiatives reach customers and operations.
- Define success through customer, commercial, and operational outcomes—not simply features shipped.
Engineering Leadership
- Lead, develop, and scale a multidisciplinary engineering organisation.
- Establish clear ownership, high standards, and a culture of pace, simplicity, craftsmanship, and accountability.
- Stay close enough to the technology to challenge architectural decisions, guide teams through difficult problems, and make sound technical trade-offs.
- Build reliable, secure, and scalable systems that protect the customer experience as Zapp grows.
- Attract, retain, and develop exceptional engineering talent.
- AI, data, and automation
- Make AI and automation practical capabilities across Zapp, applying them where they can materially improve the customer experience, operational performance, or employee productivity.
- Use modern AI-assisted engineering practices to improve development speed, code quality, and team effectiveness.
- Partner closely with Data Science and Analytics to strengthen personalisation, forecasting, decision-making, and predictive operations.
- Evaluate emerging technologies with commercial judgment, separating meaningful opportunities from hype.
- Cross-functional leadership
- Operate as a close partner to commercial, operations, data, finance, and other business leaders.
- Build a deep understanding of Zapp’s customers, fulfilment operations, economics, and strategic priorities.
- Communicate priorities, decisions, progress, and risks clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Bring an owner’s mentality: identify opportunities, take responsibility, and drive work through to measurable results.
What We’re Looking For
- Significant software engineering experience, including experience leading engineering teams at VP, Head of Engineering, Engineering Director, or equivalent level.
- A strong record of personally driving meaningful digital products from opportunity or idea through to launch and iteration.
- Evidence of building products that delivered measurable customer, commercial, or operational impact.
- Deep technical judgment and the credibility to engage with engineers on architecture, reliability, security, and development practices.
- Strong product instincts, including the ability to understand users, frame ambiguous problems, prioritise effectively, and make pragmatic trade-offs.
- Experience building and developing high-performing, multidisciplinary engineering teams.
- Experience operating complex, high-availability production systems; experience in consumer technology, marketplaces, logistics, retail, or similarly operational environments would be valuable.
- The ability to combine long-term thinking with urgency and hands-on execution.
- Excellent communication and the confidence to work directly with founders, executives, partners, and teams across the business.
- High intellectual curiosity, low ego, and a strong sense of ownership.
- A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field—or equivalent professional experience.
Why Zapp?
This is a genuinely differentiated leadership opportunity: direct access to Zapp’s Founder and Executive Team, ownership of a technology organisation at the centre of the business, and the mandate to shape and ship products with visible customer and commercial impact.
Your work will be consequential, fast-moving, and experienced directly by our customers and operational teams. For the right person, this is a rare opportunity to combine product creation, technical leadership, and company-building in one role.
Benefits
A genuinely differentiated career opportunity: direct access to the Founder and Senior Leadership Team of one of London's most ambitious startups, combined with full ownership of the engineering organisation that sits at the core of the business. Your work will be visible, consequential, and fast-moving. For the right person, this is the fastest way to combine strategic thinking with real technical leadership in a high-growth environment.
Of course we also offer:
- Competitive salary & equity package.
- Private Health Insurance (Bupa)
- Zapp Credit for testing the Zapp service and experience
- Extended sick pay and maternity/paternity leave pay.
- 25 days annual leave, excluding UK Bank Holidays
- Healthy lunch provided 4 days of a week at HQ
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