Head of Engineering

Head Of Engineering

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. 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.
• The team overall.
• Delivery.
• Partnership with the business.
• The operating budget.
• Org design.
• Security and compliance.
• Executive communication.

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.
• You've been accountable for a delivery date that mattered.
• 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.
• AI-native leadership.
• Communication that holds up in writing.
• Judgment under consequence.

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.

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.