Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Authorium is a high-growth GovTech SaaS company transforming how government agencies manage administrative operations through secure, AI-enabled workflows. The Head of Engineering will lead and grow the engineering organization, own technical execution and architecture, and ensure reliable, secure delivery of the platform used for procurement, contract management, and grant management.
Responsibilities
- Hands-On Technical Contribution: You are comfortable in the codebase. You are able to take work yourself rather vs. only routing it. You personally investigate complex, ambiguous problems before deciding how to tackle them with the team. You are a technical mentor to the engineering teams you work with
- Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and grow a small blended team of full-time engineers, contractors, and an offshore agency partner across multiple time zones. Run 1:1s and career coaching, set clear expectations, manage capacity, and build a culture of collaboration and ownership and excitement around delivery
- Delivery Accountability: Own what engineering commits to and whether it lands. Set priorities, unblock the team, set realistic dates, surface slippage before it becomes a customer conversation, and course-correct in the open. Delivery predictability is the metric that matters most in your first year
- Technical Execution & Architecture: Own architecture and technical-debt decisions inside the platform and interface with security and compliance leaders. Create documented plans that acknowledge tradeoffs and guide executive decisionmaking. Be a critical member of the leadership team driving Authorium’s platform vision forward
- Engineering Quality: Set the standard. Own code review norms, testing expectations, deployment safety, and the delivery and reliability metrics the team is measured against
- Production Reliability & Security: Own uptime, incident response, and on-call structure. Partner with InfoSec and Compliance on the security and compliance posture our customers audit us against, including public-sector requirements as we expand
- AI-Native Engineering Practice: Champion tools like Claude and Cursor across the team to remove toil and create leverage. Define where agents are trusted, where their output is reviewed, what quality bar applies to agent-produced code, and how we measure output
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Work directly with Product, Delivery/Implementation, Customer Experience, and Solutions. Translate business priorities into scoped, sequenced engineering plans, and engineering constraints into language non-technical colleagues and government customers can act on. Expect to be in front of customers when it matters
- Hiring: Interview, assess, and help set the technical bar for engineering hires. Plan, forecast, and manage team capacity
Skills
- 7+ years building software, with at least 2–3 years leading engineers directly — and you are still writing and reviewing code today
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems and cloud architecture
- Demonstrable recent technical depth: you can walk us through an architecture you designed, a production incident you personally diagnosed, and a technical decision you got wrong and corrected
- Track record of maintaining predictable quality and delivery, with specifics on how you managed it and what it cost
- Experience leading a distributed team, holding quality and communication together across time zones
- Fluency with modern AI-assisted development, plus a real point of view on where agent-generated code needs human scrutiny and where it does not
- Comfortable in a growing startup environment where capacity and capabilities are being defined, refined, and operationalized
- Strong internal and external communication skills; written, calls, in-person engagements
- Experience at an early-to-mid-stage startup
- Experience in GovTech, public-sector SaaS, or another regulated, audited environment (FedRAMP, StateRAMP, SOC 2, HIPAA)
- Experience building or scaling an offshore engineering function
- Based in San Francisco Bay Area or Washington DC
Benefits
- Stock options (details at offer stage)
- 100% benefits coverage for employee
- 401K Profit Share plan
- Flexible PTO
- Home office stipend
- Comprehensive wellness benefits
- Commuter stipend for hybrid roles
- Direct executive engagement, real proximity and support for company decision making
- Genuine ownership of the platform's technical execution and the shape and direction of the team that builds it
- Experience working for a mission-forward organization, operating as a public benefit corporation with a mission to support the critical work of government
Company Overview