Our client, a leader in fraud prevention within residential real estate, is seeking a Head of Engineering for a fantastic direct hire role located in Atlanta, Georgia.
The role
Engineering has been run by the CTO since the beginning. That worked while the team was small and the roadmap was one product. It doesn't scale to three products, a growing onshore team, and institutional customers whose security reviews and delivery expectations are now a real part of how we win business.
This role takes operational ownership of engineering so the CTO can focus on product direction, partnerships, and the company's technical strategy. You'd own the team, the delivery, and the outcomes and you'd build out our onshore engineering team in Atlanta, which is the biggest structural change ahead of us.
To be direct about what that means: you are not being hired to be the best engineer in the room. You need to read our codebase, hold a credible architecture conversation, and know when a technical answer doesn't add up. But the job is building a team that ships reliably not personally shipping.
What you'd own
Building the onshore team in Atlanta. Our engineering team today is distributed, with most of it offshore. We're building an onshore presence in Atlanta, and growing that team is a core part of this role not a downstream consequence of it. You'd define what those roles are, hire into them, and build a team culture in our headquarters city that the rest of the organization can work alongside in real time.
The team overall. You own hiring end to end sourcing, interview design, calibrating a bar across interviewers, and closing candidates. You own performance: setting expectations, giving hard feedback, running a plan when someone's off track, and making the call when it isn't working. You own leveling, comp bands, and promotion criteria. You own career growth and retention for engineers who sit twelve hours away, which is a genuinely different skill from managing people down the hall.
Delivery. You're accountable for the team shipping predictably. Capacity planning, sequencing, and saying no to things. Committing to dates in front of customers and the board, and being right often enough that the next commitment is believed. Owning incident response end to end - the response, the customer communication, and the postmortem.
Partnership with the business. Our sales and customer success teams create real commercial pressure on the roadmap. You translate that into engineering plans, and you push back credibly when what's being asked for doesn't fit. That relationship working well is a large part of whether this role succeeds.
The operating budget. Cloud spend, tooling, contractors, vendor negotiation. Real dollars against real constraints.
Org design. Team structure, the onshore and offshore balance, and the build-versus-buy calls that play out over eighteen to twenty-four months rather than a sprint.
Security and compliance. SOC 2, security questionnaires from institutional buyers, vendor reviews, insurance requirements. At our customer profile this is a revenue blocker, not a back-office function, and it needs an owner who treats it that way.
Executive communication. Explaining engineering to people who don't do engineering internally, to our board, and under investor technical diligence.
First 90 days
- Get deep enough in the systems and the team to have your own opinions rather than inherited ones
- Give us an honest read on the org: where we're strong, where we're fragile, and what breaks first if we double the team
- Take ownership of delivery cadence and the commitments we're making externally
- Pick up the hiring plan that's already in motion
What we need
You've managed engineers, including through the hard parts. Hiring is the easy half. We want to hear about the performance conversation you handled badly and what you learned, the person you let go, and the person you almost lost and kept.
You've been accountable for a delivery date that mattered. Not participated in accountable for. We want to know how you plan, how you handle it when the plan slips, and how you talk about it before it slips rather than after.
You've worked with a distributed team across a significant timezone gap and can speak concretely about what you changed to make it work.
Enough technical depth to be respected. You should be able to read our code, evaluate an architectural proposal, and recognize when an estimate is fiction. Our stack is TypeScript / Node, React, Python, AWS, MongoDB, and Redis. You don't need depth in all of it; you do need to have been a strong engineer at some point and to have kept your judgment current.
AI-native leadership. We use Claude, Cursor, and agentic workflows daily. We expect you to have a view on how AI changes what a team of this size can do and an equally clear view on where accountability sits when the code is generated. "The model wrote it" isn't an answer here, and the standard you set on that question will shape the whole team.
Communication that holds up in writing. Most of our coordination is asynchronous. You need to make an argument in a document, disagree productively with the CTO, and explain a technical tradeoff to a board member in the same week.
Judgment under consequence. Our products decide whether a listing is fraudulent, whether a publisher has breached a license, and whether a seller is who they claim to be. Wrong answers cost people money or standing. We want a leader who feels that weight and builds a team that feels it too.
Nice to have
- Fraud, risk, trust and safety, identity verification, payments, or fintech experience
- Having built an engineering org from single digits into the twenties or thirties
- Experience hiring in the Atlanta market, or building an onshore team alongside an established offshore one
- SOC 2 or equivalent compliance ownership from the ground up
- Real estate, PropTech, or MLS-adjacent domain knowledge
What stays with the CTO
Product direction, technical strategy, partnerships, and architecture at the company level. You'd have a strong voice in all of it, and total ownership of how engineering executes against it. If you're looking for a seat where the technical vision is entirely yours, this isn't that role and we'd rather say so now.
Logistics
- Location: Strong preference for Atlanta, or willingness to relocate. Building our onshore team here is central to the role, and that work is meaningfully easier from the ground recruiting a local network, meeting candidates in person, and giving the team an anchor in our headquarters city. For an exceptional candidate elsewhere in the US (PT, MT, CT, or ET), we'll talk, with the expectation of regular travel to Atlanta.
- Travel: Two offsites per year in the Southeast, plus customer and board travel as needed.
- Compensation: $200,000 - $250,000 base, plus equity. W-2, full-time.