Head of Engineering at Authorium

About Authorium

Authorium is a high-growth GovTech SaaS company transforming how government agencies manage administrative operations. Our platform replaces fragmented document management solutions and decades-old legacy systems with a unified user interaction and data layer that manages billions of dollars in public funds, serving state, local, and federal agencies that support millions of citizens and businesses. Authorium sits at the intersection of modernization, public service, and technology innovation, including AI-enabled workflows. Our team moves fast, collaborates across teams, and builds for impact.

The Role

We are hiring a Head of Engineering to build and grow the team that develops the platform used by state and local governments to manage complex workflows such as procurement, contract management, and grant management.

This senior engineering role reports directly to executive leadership. The Head of Engineering is a builder and leader, owning the team, technical execution, and delivering excellence on behalf of our customers. Authorium’s engineering team is small but mighty and growing. We seek a leader who can engage directly in engineering work, execute key initiatives, and provide guidance and direction for the team.

You will collaborate across on-shore and off-shore engineering squads to deliver a platform that is highly secure, meets stringent compliance requirements, and provides an excellent user experience for government agencies with real procurement deadlines, compliance obligations, and limited tolerance for downtime. This is mission-critical software delivery, and reliability, performance, and user experience are paramount.

What You’ll Own

• Hands-On Technical Contribution: You are comfortable in the codebase, capable of taking on work yourself, and personally investigating complex problems before deciding how to tackle them with the team. You serve as a technical mentor to the engineering teams.
• Team Leadership: Lead, coach, and grow a small blended team of full-time engineers, contractors, and an offshore agency partner across multiple time zones. Conduct 1:1s, career coaching, set clear expectations, manage capacity, and build a culture of collaboration, ownership, and excitement around delivery.
• Delivery Accountability: Own engineering commitments and their outcomes. Set priorities, unblock the team, establish realistic deadlines, and address slippage before it impacts customers. Delivery predictability is the key metric in your first year.
• Technical Execution & Architecture: Own architecture and technical-debt decisions within the platform and interface with security and compliance leaders. Create documented plans acknowledging trade-offs to guide executive decision-making. Be a critical member of the leadership team driving Authorium’s platform vision.
• Engineering Quality: Set the standard for code review norms, testing expectations, deployment safety, and delivery/reliability metrics.
• Production Reliability & Security: Ensure uptime, manage incident response, and oversee on-call structure. Partner with InfoSec and Compliance to maintain security and compliance posture, including public-sector requirements as the company expands.
• AI-Native Engineering Practice: Champion tools like Claude and Cursor to reduce toil and create leverage. Define where agents are trusted, where their output is reviewed, and the quality bar for agent-generated code, including measurement of output.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Work directly with Product, Delivery/Implementation, Customer Experience, and Solutions. Translate business priorities into scoped, sequenced engineering plans, and communicate engineering constraints to non-technical colleagues and government customers.
• Hiring: Interview, assess, and set the technical bar for engineering hires. Plan, forecast, and manage team capacity.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 Days: Learn the codebase and customer business case, ship something real with team support, and understand the architecture, fragile parts, open incidents, and every team member. Gain a clear-eyed view of delivery status.
• First 90 Days: Own and meet delivery commitments, understand and refine the team’s operating cadence (planning, review, on-call, incident response), and establish documented execution plans against capacity and priorities.

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of software development experience, 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, including the ability to discuss an architecture you designed, a production incident you diagnosed, and a technical decision you corrected.
• Track record of maintaining predictable quality and delivery, with specifics on how you managed it and its cost.
• Experience leading a distributed team, maintaining quality and communication across time zones.
• Fluency with modern AI-assisted development, plus a clear perspective on where agent-generated code requires human scrutiny and where it does not.
• Comfortable in a growing startup environment where capacity and capabilities are being defined and operationalized.
• Strong internal and external communication skills, including written communication, calls, and in-person engagements.

Bonus Points

• Experience at an early-to-mid-stage startup.
• Experience in GovTech, public-sector SaaS, or another regulated, audited environment (e.g., FedRAMP, StateRAMP, SOC 2, HIPAA).
• Experience building or scaling an offshore engineering function.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Washington DC.