Head of Engineering

Location: San Francisco, CA (hybrid, 3 days per week in office)

Salary: $220K - $300K + strong equity (equity flexes up for the right person)

Industry: AI / GovTech SaaS

Work Authorization: This role does not offer H-1B transfers/sponsorship. Green card holders and TN visa holders are welcome to apply.

Who you'll join

A seed-stage, profitable AI-native startup making government permitting unremarkable. The US is short 4-7 million homes and permitting is one of the slowest parts of building them. Over 1,000 hours of user research across 300+ staff and applicants in 50+ municipalities happened before a single line of code was written. Customers already include major US cities, a county government and a state government, with multiple states in the pipeline.

This is not a typical govtech team. Engineers sit at desks inside their customers' planning departments. They hold government email addresses. Feedback loops are measured in hours, not quarters. The team is 12 people, seven engineers, all AI-native, backed by $5M from top-tier investors and profitable with more demand than they can serve.

What you'll do

1. Own what ships, how fast, and how reliably. End-to-end accountability for engineering output on timelines the business can stand behind
2. Stay in the code. This is a player-coach role, roughly 50-70% hands-on
3. Make the architectural calls on data infrastructure that protect the company's moat. This is a system of record, and the data decisions made now will define the product for years
4. Turn AI tooling access into real shipping velocity. No AI slop
5. Scope ruthlessly. Know what has to be right first time and what can ship rough and improve later
6. Build the engineering operating system: code review, on-call, incident response, security. The basics exist. You make them good
7. Raise the hiring bar and grow the team selectively. You own the bar and the team's size

Who you are

1. A strong IC engineer with 7+ years of experience who has recently led teams at an early-stage B2B startup
2. Recent early-stage experience matters. If your last startup was five or ten years ago, this won't be a fit
3. You think in business outcomes first and translate them into technical decisions second
4. Product-minded, not architecture-obsessed. You know when good enough ships and when getting it wrong breaks things
5. You communicate directly, take feedback without taking it personally, and push back with evidence when you disagree
6. You've managed engineers before, or you're a tech lead or director of engineering ready to step up into your first head of role
7. Mission-driven. You want to solve real problems in the built environment that affect millions of people

Tech stack

React, Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS

Why you'll join

1. A profitable seed-stage company. Genuinely rare right now
2. A founder with 20+ years of startup experience, a consulting background, eight years in product, with three previous startups exited or thriving
3. Architectural decisions that define the product for years, not quarters
4. A real path to VP Engineering, CTO, or even technical co-founder for the right person
5. Interview process: founder call, leadership, technical screen. Fast and direct