Software Engineering Lead

About Kape Technologies 

Kape (LSE: KAPE, privatized 2023) is a global leader in the "Privacy-First" digital security era. We are the powerhouse behind the world’s most trusted consumer privacy brands. With over 7 million paying subscribers and a global team of 1,000+ experts across 10 locations, our mission is to provide complete digital autonomy. We believe that a free and open internet starts with state-of-the-art technology. As we scale toward the next 10 million users, we are consolidating our web infrastructure into a unified, next-generation content platform that matches the world-class engineering of our core VPN products. 

Software Engineering Lead

Location:  Bucharest, Romania

Technology: PHP/Laravel, React, NextJS, TypeScript

The Challenge 

You will lead an operational engineering squad responsible for both frontend and backend systems across three distinct brands, ensuring reliability, scalability, and continuous delivery of customer-facing experiences. You will drive the evolution of our platforms by building new product elements and executing high-impact design and revenue experiments to optimize user engagement and conversion.

A core part of your mission will be consolidating and modernizing our overall technology stack. You will oversee the migration of legacy tools and blog platforms into a unified internal CMS built on Laravel and React, shaping it into a flexible, extensible system that supports multiple brands and use cases. This includes defining content structures, streamlining editorial workflows, and enabling rapid iteration across marketing and product teams.

In parallel, you will lead the development of new features within our customer-facing dashboards, including CLP areas, performance, SEO, and personalization. You will also take ownership of integrating and customizing multiple payment providers, ensuring seamless, secure, and regionally optimized transaction flows. Throughout, you are expected to balance experimentation with operational excellence, maintaining system stability while enabling fast-paced product innovation.

Key Responsibilities 

• Multi-Brand Platform Ownership: Lead the engineering squad responsible for the end-to-end operation of frontend and backend systems across three brands. Ensure system reliability, scalability, and continuous delivery while balancing experimentation with production stability.
• Experimentation & Growth Engineering: Drive the development of new UI components and backend capabilities to support rapid design, UX, and revenue experiments. Establish frameworks for A/B testing, feature flagging, and data-driven iteration across all brands.
• Internal CMS Evolution (Laravel + React): Own the architecture, extension, and adoption of the internal CMS platform built on Laravel and React. Lead the migration of legacy tools into this unified system, ensuring consistency, maintainability, and extensibility across use cases.
• Blog & Content Platform Consolidation: Oversee the migration of multiple blog platforms into the internal CMS. Standardize content models, improve editorial workflows, and enable scalable multi-brand publishing with strong SEO and performance foundations.
• Customer Dashboard Development: Drive the continuous improvement of customer-facing areas such as CLP dashboards. Deliver new features that enhance usability, personalization, and overall product value while maintaining high performance and stability.
• Payments Integration & Optimization: Lead the integration and customization of multiple payment providers. Ensure seamless, secure, and regionally optimized payment flows, while enabling flexibility for experimentation and business-driven adjustments.
• Operational Excellence & Delivery: Establish engineering best practices for code quality, deployment, monitoring, and incident management. Ensure the squad can operate efficiently in a high-velocity environment with clear ownership and accountability. 
• Develop new software and participate in the maintenance and enhancement of existing software applications;
• Build and maintain tools for deployment, monitoring and operations for various components of infrastructure;
• Focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery of the company's core products;
• Contribute with innovative ideas and methods to continuously improve quality and development efficiency;
• Oversees the activity of the other developers, coordinating and coaching the web development team;

Technical Requirements (Hard Skills) 

• Next.js & React Mastery: Strong experience with the App Router, Server Components, and performance optimization for massive traffic (millions of monthly uniques). 
• PHP Ecosystem: Main focus will be on Laravel, but also on legacy applications built with CakePHP or WordPress. Hands-on experience with open-source headless CMS platforms (WordPress, Strapi, or similar) is a plus. 
• Infrastructure Knowledge: Ability to set precise tasks for DevOps and verify the integrity of deployments, proxying, and firewalling (AWS is a plus). 
• Technical SEO (optional): Deep knowledge of how headless architectures impact crawlability, schema, and dynamic sitemaps. 

Why Join Kape? 

This is a rare opportunity to own the web platform for one of the biggest names in cybersecurity. You will have the budget and the mandate to move away from legacy debt and build a "Golden Path" for web development using the best of the JavaScript and open-source ecosystem—starting with a best-in-class headless CMS as the foundation.

Before you apply

• At the moment, we do not sponsor visas in the EU. For Hong Kong, we require at least two years of working experience and a university degree in a related field. For Singapore and the UK, we can only sponsor visas for mid-career or above.
• Please upload your resume as a PDF and do not include any salary or compensation information in it.

ExpressVPN is one of the world’s leading providers of online privacy and security services for consumers. Started in 2009, we’ve grown to have millions of active paying customers, a team of more than 700 people worldwide, and a brand recognized by hundreds of millions of people in 18 languages and more than a hundred countries. We see huge growth in our industry, and are gaining market share through strong execution.