Head of Engineering

Job Description

Job Description

Career Renew is recruiting for one of its clients a Head of Engineering - this is a hybrid position in San Francisco. Salary range: 200-260K USD base plus benefits plus equity.

We are making permitting unremarkable. The US is short 4–7 million homes, and the permit process is among the slowest parts of building them. We spent thousands of hours with hundreds of staff and applicants across 50+ municipalities before a line of code was written. We're building toward an agentic system that fundamentally changes how local government works, starting with permitting.

We've raised $5M from top-tier investors, we're profitable, and we have more customer demand than we can keep up with. Our customers include San Francisco, New York City, Sonoma County, and the State of Delaware.

Why this role now

We have product-market fit and a team of distributed senior/staff engineers (all working PST timezone), but no one owns engineering execution end-to-end. Sales and NRR are accelerating rapidly, and engineering needs to match.

We've built the company as an AI-native engineering org: a lean team using aggressive AI leverage to out-ship bigger competitors. It's a fundamentally different operating model, and it needs a player-coach to run it.

What you'll do

• Own what ships, how fast, and how reliably. End-to-end accountability for engineering output, on timelines we stand behind. You stay close enough to the code to make sharp technical calls and earn your team's trust.

• Align technical decisions with business goals. Make architectural calls that builds and protects our competitive moat: user experience, data modeling, and data centricity.

• Make the hard calls the company needs. Cut scope, hold a high bar, and optimize for what Infilla needs to win.

• Get real velocity from AI tools. Every engineer has access to whatever they need. Your job is making that access pay off in what ships. No AI slop.

• Build the operating system for engineering and the team that runs it. Code review, on-call, incident response, security. The basics exist. You make them good. Raise the hiring bar as we grow selectively. You own both the bar and the team's size.

What success looks like

Engineering is not a bottleneck to the business’s growth and is a competitive advantage. This means:

• Engineering is shipping fast, not fighting tools or process

• Delivery is predictable: we can commit to customer timelines and hit them

• There isn’t a tradeoff between speed and quality of what gets shipped

• We've shipped capabilities no government software company has shipped before

Requirements:

7+ years of experience as a strong IC engineer and recently led teams at an early-stage B2B start-up (Mandatory)

Non-negotiable to have operated in a 10-20 person company before (Mandatory)

Led a distributed engineering team of 5+ at an early-stage B2B startup (Mandatory)

Experience building user-facing products at the application layer and ideally strong fluency with data modelling and production data systems (Mandatory)

GovTech or regulated industries (e.g., health tech, fintech), former founders or founding engineers, or at data-centric product companies (e.g., Hex, Amplitude) (Nice-to-have)

Strong technical fundamental and shipped production code in the last 6 months (Mandatory)

Fluent across the stack including React, Node, Postgres, AWS, and Terraform (Mandatory)

Ability to be an intellectual sparring partner with leadership including accepting direct feedback and pushing back when genuinely disagreeing (Mandatory)

Interfaced with external stakeholders/customers and able to translate technical concepts to non-technical individuals in a concise manner (Mandatory)

Genuine and/or demonstrated excitement to solve the specific domain problem of the housing crisis / boring government software (Mandatory)

Why candidates should join us

• A Broken System, a Clear Fix – The US is short 4–7 million homes and the permit process is one of the slowest parts of building them. Local government has never had a modern system of record, let alone an agentic one. Infilla is building it – AI-native, purpose-built for the people who actually use it, and is already running it inside the governments that issue those permits. The problem is enormous, the solution is working, and the timing is right.

• The Business Is Real and Accelerating – Revenue has grown tremendously recently and the team has quadrupled in recent months. We are seed-stage yet profitable, have zero customer churn, and contracts that double or expand every year. We've signed our first state this year and are already in active conversations with five, six, seven more. There is more inbound demand than the team can currently keep up with – which is exactly why this role exists.

• You Will Never Build in the Dark – There is a misconception that government means slow and disconnected. We have desks at San Francisco Planning, email addresses with the State of Delaware, and are inside Microsoft Teams with its customers day-to-day. The feedback loop is immediate. On top of that, over 1,000 hours of user research with 300-plus staff and applicants across 50-plus municipalities happened before a single line of code was written. Jenny sold the first three customers on Figma designs before engineering existed. This speaks to clear PMF and continued growth at scale.

• The First Engineering Leader at a Company at Inflection – There is no engineering playbook here yet. No one currently owns execution end-to-end, and the architectural decisions that will define what this product looks like at scale have not been made. You will be the most senior engineer in the room, partnering directly with a founder who has built and exited companies before and thinks in outcomes, not features. This is not a seat-warming role – it is genuine ownership at exactly the moment it matters most.

• A Genuine Path to Technical Co-Founder – We are explicit about this: for the right person who earns it, there is a path to technical co-founder. Not as a title handed out to retain someone, but as a real partnership built over time through what you ship and the trust that creates. She knows that the person who owns engineering at this stage shapes the company as much as anyone. If you are the kind of engineer who wants to look back in five years and say you built something that mattered from the ground up – this is that opportunity.