VP Software Engineering

About Us

At Nextlane , we don’t just develop software solutions – we create the future of the automotive industry.

We are a company that combines advanced technology with a clear vision: simplifying and digitizing every step of the automotive customer journey, empowering manufacturers and dealerships to thrive in a constantly evolving market.

We believe in the value of every team member, offering opportunities for you to develop and contribute to meaningful solutions.

So… What does it mean to be a #Nextlaner?

• Be part of a growth-oriented culture .

• Collaborate with colleagues from all over the world.

• Believe in the Power of ideas and the diversity of thought .

• Be committed to provide an environment where you can learn, grow, and collaborate on projects that make a global impact.

Our success is measured not just by results, but also by the growth and satisfaction of those who are part of our company.

At Nextlane, you’ll have the opportunity to innovate , push boundaries , and work on solutions that are transforming the automotive world.

The Mission

Nextlane builds the software that runs automotive retail across 14 countries, with more than 60 manufacturer integrations. Today that runs on around ten legacy dealer management systems, built over three decades in technologies that are now at the end of their life.

We are replacing them with a single cloud platform, and we are building it with AI at the centre: both in how our engineers work, and in what our customers get. Our AI products are already live and generating revenue, and they are the fastest growing part of our portfolio.

You will lead the engineering organisation that builds all of it: the cloud product portfolio, the single platform that replaces the legacy estate, and the AI products we sell to dealers and manufacturers.

This is a build job, not a caretaking job. The legacy estate keeps running while you build what replaces it, so you will be making hard sequencing calls about what gets migrated, what gets rewritten and what gets left alone, with real customers on the other side of every one of them.

Your Responsibilities

You will be responsible for:

• Engineering strategy and delivery. Defining and executing the engineering strategy for the cloud product portfolio, aligned to the company strategy and the product vision, and owning delivery, scalability, reliability and operational excellence.

• An engineering organisation of around 30 people, led through Engineering Managers, with Principal and Staff Engineers on the technical track. Building and scaling those teams across several product domains, and developing the leaders inside them.

• The AI product portfolio. The engineering capability, evaluation discipline, reliability and unit cost model that let us ship customer-facing AI features safely and repeatedly, including ownership of the Skywalker team.

• Agentic development. Driving our agentic development operating model inside your organisation. We have standardised on Claude Code for all engineers, with autonomy gated by a defined AI fluency scale. You will take this from adoption to measured delivery outcomes, and contribute to how it works across the company.

• Architectural coherence. Working with our Architecture Practice and our Platform engineering team so that we ship one platform rather than several that resemble each other.

What success looks like

• The single platform has a credible, sequenced delivery plan, with the first migrated modules live with real customers rather than in pilot.

• Agentic development is measurably changing throughput and quality in your teams, with the numbers to prove it rather than anecdotes.

• Shipped further customer-facing AI capabilities to production, with an evaluation and cost model you can defend to the executive team.

• Your leadership bench is strong enough that the organisation runs without you in the middle of it.

️ What We’re Looking For

These are the requirements that decide this hire. We will probe each one with specific evidence, so please come prepared with examples.

1. You have led a real agentic development transformation, not a tooling rollout.

You have taken an engineering organisation from AI-assisted coding to agentic delivery, and you changed the operating model to match: how work is decomposed, what the definition of done is, how code review and testing hold up when generated volume goes up, and how you meas