Head of Engineering

Socket.dev; United States; Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Benefits for employee

401K plan

Flexible PTO

Home office stipend

Wellness benefits

Commuter stipend

Executive engagement

Job summary

Authorium is seeking a Head of Engineering to build and grow the team that develops the GovTech platform used by state and local governments for procurement, contracts, and grant management.

You will own the team, the technical execution, and guide delivery with a focus on security, reliability, and user experience across on-shore and off-shore squads. This leadership role reports to executive leadership and requires direct coding involvement and strategic direction.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building software with leadership experience.
• Experience leading distributed teams across time zones.
• Proven architecture design and incident diagnosis.
• Track record of delivering on commitments and improving predictability.
• Strong communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable in a growing startup environment.
• Experience with AI-assisted development and code review standards.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on technical work and mentoring teammates.
• Lead and grow a small blended team across multiple time zones.
• Own delivery commitments and unblock the team.
• Own architecture and address technical debt.
• Maintain engineering quality, testing, and deployment safety.
• Ensure production reliability and security with compliance.
• Champion AI-native practices and governance of agent-generated code.
• Collaborate with Product, Delivery, Customer Experience and Solutions.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

Technical depth

Team leadership

AI-assisted development

Communication skills

Job description

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 in turn support millions of citizens and businesses. Authorium sits at the intersection of modernization, public service, and technology innovation like AI-enabled workflows. Our team moves fast, collaborates across teams, and builds for impact.

ABOUT THE HEAD OF ENGINEERING ROLE

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

This senior engineering seat reports directly to the executive leadership. The Head of Engineering is a builder and a leader: owning the team, the technical execution, and executing with excellence on behalf of our customers. Authorium’s engineering team is small, but mighty and growing. We are looking for a leader that can get directly engaged in the work of the engineering team, directly execute key initiatives, and provide guidance and direction for the team.

You will work collaboratively across both on-shore and off-shore engineering squads to deliver a platform experience that is highly secure, meets some of the most stringent compliance requirements, and provides an excellent user experience to our customers and their stakeholders. Our customers are government agencies with real procurement deadlines, real compliance obligations, and limited tolerance for downtime. This is mission-critical software delivery and important work is tied to its reliability, performance, and experience.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

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.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

First 30 Days: Learn the codebase and the customer business case — ship something real with support from the team. Get to know the architecture, the fragile parts, the open incidents, and every person on the team. You have a clear-eyed read on where delivery actually stands.

First 90 Days: Delivery commitments are yours and they are being met and/or negotiated. The team's operating cadence — planning, review, on-call, incident response — is understood and running. Documented execution plans against capacity and priorities are the norm.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 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.

BONUS POINTS

• 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

WHAT WE OFFER

• Salary Range: $200,000–$250,000

• 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