Engineering Tech Lead

About the role

We need someone who can lead a small engineering team building AutoBid — a SaaS platform that automates U.S. government procurement bidding — while still writing code that matters. This is not a management role that happens to have a technical title. You will own the technical direction of the product, make architecture decisions your team executes against, and personally build the parts of the system that are too important or too ambiguous to hand off.

The inputs are messy, compliance constraints are real, and the output has to be reliable enough that customers commit real procurement dollars based on it. You will set technical direction, sequence the work, unblock people, and be accountable for what gets delivered. You will also coordinate with product, security and compliance staff on key decisions. 

What you will do

• Own the system architecture and make binding technical decisions on data model design, API contracts, service boundaries, and infrastructure patterns
• Define and enforce engineering standards: code review, testing, logging, documentation, and deployment practices
• Maintain the technical roadmap and sequence features against product priorities and integration complexity
• Write production code on the highest-leverage and highest-risk parts of the system, and stay current on the whole codebase — you cannot lead technical decisions for code you have not read
• Ensure the codebase remains auditable, well-documented, and structured for deployment into regulated cloud environments
• Lead and grow the engineers on your team: regular one-on-ones, honest feedback in both directions, and work assigned to people's strengths rather than round-robin
• Hire well: define role requirements, screen candidates, run technical interviews, and make hiring decisions. We value engineers who take ownership beyond ticket scope and give definitive answers over those who hedge
• Work with security and compliance staff so architecture decisions support our SOC 2, FedRAMP, and CMMC posture
• Engage directly with the procurement specialists who use AutoBid, and prioritize improvements based on real usage
• Represent engineering in program reviews, translating technical status into terms non-engineers can act on without oversimplifying the risks

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a team lead, tech lead, or engineering management role
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript across the full stack, with production server-side and front-end experience
• Deep hands-on PostgreSQL experience: you can diagnose a slow query, redesign a schema under load, and make migration decisions with confidence
• Demonstrated experience building data-intensive systems that ingest from multiple sources of varying quality and structure
• Track record of architectural decisions that held up as requirements changed
• Experience as both the technical authority and the people manager on a small engineering team
• Ability to write production code while managing a team — expect to spend 40–60% of your time coding, not zero
• Strong written and verbal communication, from architecture decision records to clear feedback to your reports
• Comfort making decisions with incomplete information and adjusting course as you learn more
• U.S. citizenship required

Preferred qualifications

• Experience integrating LLMs into production systems: prompt engineering, structured extraction, evaluation, and accuracy/cost/latency tradeoffs
• Production AWS and infrastructure-as-code experience, with familiarity with container-based deployment and CI/CD
• Experience in regulated or compliance-constrained environments where audit trails and security baselines are engineering requirements — SOC 2, FedRAMP, or CMMC a strong plus
• Background in supply chain, procurement, or government contracting data systems
• Prior experience in the defense industrial base or government contracting environment

What this role is not

This is not a director-level role managing managers, nor a pure IC staff engineer role with a “lead” title. You will manage individual contributors directly, write code alongside them, have difficult performance conversations, and be accountable for what the team delivers. The right candidate wants to do both: lead a team and write code, set direction and get into the details. On a team this size, that is the job.

How to apply

Submit your resume and a brief note covering two things: a system you built or significantly shaped technically, and a team you led through a difficult delivery. Keep it concise.

Equal opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

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