Profound
Tech / AI / Software
TechLeadManager,Foundations
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.
“Tech Lead Manager, Foundations at Profound. Skills: identity and auth, authorization models, billing and metering logic, audit systems, admin tooling, backend engineering, people management. Lead the Foundations roadmap. partnering with the CTO, Head of Engineering, and product leadership on priorities”
What You'll Achieve.
own outcomes for the team
Industry & Context.
Drive technical decisions on hard problems
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
7+ years of backend engineering experience, at least 2 years managing or tech-leading a team, Deep, hands-on experience with identity and auth you've built or operated SAML, OIDC, and SCIM integrations in production and can reason about the security and UX tradeoffs, product sense for B2B you understand the differences between self-serve and enterprise motions and can design systems that serve both without forking the codebase, Postgres you can reason about indexes, query plans, multi-tenant data models, and migrations without reaching for a tutorial, Experience with billing and metering systems, and an appreciation for how much edge-case logic lives in invoicing, proration, and high-volume event ingestion, Experience hiring senior ICs and giving direct, useful feedback, Comfortable being an IC contributor on the team you we don't want a manager who has stopped writing code, Experience scaling a foundations or platform team from a small group to 10+ engineers, Background at a B2B SaaS company that sold to enterprise (Fortune 500 procurement and security review experience helps), Experience designing audit and activity log systems that meet enterprise compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001)
Nice to Have
Familiarity with WorkOS or similar identity platforms, Experience standing up admin and internal tooling that engineering doesn't have to babysit
What You'll Do.
Lead the Foundations roadmap
partnering with the CTO
and product leadership on priorities
Hire and develop a team of 4 to 8 engineers
running interview loops
calibrating performance
setting expectations clearly
Drive technical decisions on hard problems
Ship code yourself on the highest-leverage parts of the system
Be the engineering point of contact for enterprise customers when SSO
or provisioning issues escalate
Represent Foundations in conversations with sales
and the executive team when identity
or audit decisions affect commitments
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
partnering with the CTO, Head of Engineering, and product leadership on priorities; Represent Foundations in conversations with sales, customer success, finance, and the executive team
Communication Scope
setting expectations clearly
Process & Methodology
running a tight planning process, own outcomes for the team
Full Job Description
Profound is on a mission to help companies understand and control their AI presence. We are hiring a Tech Lead Manager to build and lead our Foundations team in San Francisco. Foundations owns the shared services that every product team at Profound depends on: identity and access, multi-tenancy, billing, audit and activity logs, and the internal tooling that powers our admin and operations workflows. This is the team that decides how customers log in, how we model self-serve versus enterprise accounts, how we bill them, how we track what happens in the product, and how our internal teams operate it day-to-day. The work is high-leverage, deeply cross-functional, and frequently customer-facing, since enterprise SSO and provisioning are often part of the sales process. This is a hybrid role. You'll spend roughly half your time on technical leadership and architecture, and half on people management, hiring, and execution. We expect you to write code, review PRs, and be in the details on critical decisions. We also expect you to grow engineers, run a tight planning process, and own outcomes for the team. The Foundations team owns authentication and authorization (SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, session management, and the authorization model spanning self-serve users, enterprise tenants, and internal admins); account types and tenancy (the data model and product surface for self-serve accounts, enterprise organizations with complex hierarchies, and internal admin access, including org switching, role assignment, invitation flows, and tenant isolation); billing (subscription management, invoicing, Stripe integration, and our in-house metering service that handles billions of events per day); audit and activity logs (the systems that track what users and admins do in the product, critical for enterprise security reviews, customer-facing activity feeds, and internal investigations); and internal admin tooling (the admin panel that customer success, sales engineering, an
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