Title: Head of Engineering

Location: Austin, TX (relocation supported for the right candidate)

Reporting Structure: This role reports to the cofounder & Head of Product

The Company

Our client is a fast-growing B2B SaaS company building a legislative intelligence platform used by government affairs professionals to track bills, monitor hearings, and stay ahead of policy changes across U.S. state legislatures. 

The product is trusted by over 100 organizations spanning public-sector entities, trade associations, and corporate government relations teams, and has grown revenue 3x in the past six months. With clear product-market fit and an active fundraising process underway, the company is now focused on scaling its data infrastructure and evolving the platform toward more automated, AI-powered workflows.

Why This Role is Exciting

• End-to-end ownership: Own architecture, delivery, and technical decision-making at a company with clear product-market fit and accelerating growth.
• True product partnership: Work side-by-side with product leadership to translate customer needs into scalable, durable systems.
• Solve meaningful problems: Build infrastructure that ingests, normalizes, and serves complex legislative data across all 50 U.S. states—each with unique formats, rules, and update patterns.
• AI with purpose: Help evolve the platform from a powerful assistant into more autonomous, agent-driven workflows using production-grade AI systems.
• Hands-on leadership: Lead as a player-coach—mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and contributing directly to the codebase every day.

The Role

As Head of Engineering, you will be accountable for technical outcomes across architecture, delivery, and team performance. 

Responsibilities include:

Technical Architecture & Systems Design

• Design and own a scalable, maintainable data architecture capable of supporting 50-state legislative coverage.
• Replace brittle, bespoke scraping approaches with extensible systems where indicating new data sources becomes easier over time.
• Make principled build vs. buy decisions and manage technical debt intentionally.
• Ensure systems are production-grade: reliable, auditable, observable, and maintainable.

AI & Platform Evolution

• Build production systems on top of foundation models (not ML research).
• Architect data layers that AI agents can traverse safely and efficiently.
• Design and orchestrate agent workflows (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, or similar).
• Implement RAG at scale with proper observability and evaluation.
• Create tool-first architectures where system capabilities are well-defined and accessible to agents.

Delivery & Execution

• Own delivery timelines and quality across the engineering roadmap.
• Ship features reliably under real-world constraints and ambiguity.
• Partner with Product to assess feasibility, surface tradeoffs, and sequence work effectively.

Team Leadership & Growth

• Lead and mentor a team of three highly capable full-stack engineers.
• Set technical standards, review code, and help the team level up as the company scales.
• Hire thoughtfully as the team grows, focusing on quality, ownership, and craft.
• Provide clarity and direction without over-processing or unnecessary bureaucracy.

Individual Contribution

• Write production code daily across backend, data, and infrastructure layers.
• Debug complex issues and lead by example in system design and execution.
• Stay close to the product and users to ensure engineering decisions drive real business value.

Tech Stack

• Backend: Python (FastAPI), with legacy Ruby on Rails being phased out
• Frontend: React, TypeScript
• Infrastructure: AWS, CDK for infrastructure as code
• AI: LangChain, LangGraph, and various foundation models

Is This You?

• Led engineering—or operated very close to engineering leadership—at an early-stage startup.
• Scaled systems and teams as a company grew from ~$1M ARR into real growth.
• Strong engineer who can go deep on hard technical problems, not just delegate them.
• You have hands-on experience shipping AI-powered systems into production.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, pressure, and making high-stakes technical decisions.
• You have strong opinions about building software well and can clearly explain and defend them.
• Operate with high agency and act in the company’s best interest without needing direction.
• You care deeply about craft and understand how engineering choices translate into business outcomes.

Compensation

• Base Salary: $180,000–$220,000, depending on experience
• Equity: Meaningful early-stage equity