Tech Lead Manager, Foundations
Profound
| Company | Profound |
| Category | Engineering |
| Location | San Francisco |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Manager |
| Salary | USD 230k–275k |
| Posted | 5 May 2026 |
| Last verified | 30 Jul 2026 |
| Source | Employer career page (ashby) |
Description
Profound is the marketing platform for the age of AI search. The way brands reach people is being rewritten — AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode are now the answer layer between companies and their customers. We built the platform marketers use to understand, measure, and win in that world: the analytics, intelligence, and agent automation that turn AI search from a threat into a competitive advantage.
We went from 0 to a $1B valuation in 18 months. Revenue grew 100x last year. Our customers include Ramp, Figma, Spotify, Nike, Apple, AWS, Reddit, and JPMC. We are backed by Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, LSVP, and Khosla Ventures — and we are moving fast enough that the people joining now are building the playbook everyone who comes after them will run.
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, and support use to operate the product).
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead the Foundations roadmap, partnering with the CTO, Head of Engineering, and product leadership on priorities
- Hire and develop a team of 4 to 8 engineers, including running interview loops, calibrating performance, and setting expectations clearly
- Drive technical decisions on hard problems: authorization models that work across account types, identity provider integrations for enterprise customers, billing and metering logic that handles edge cases without breaking, audit systems that scale, and admin tooling that grows with the company
- Ship code yourself on the highest-leverage parts of the system
- Be the engineering point of contact for enterprise customers when SSO, SCIM, or provisioning issues escalate
- Represent Foundations in conversations with sales, customer success, finance, and the executive team when identity, billing, or audit decisions affect commitments
WHO YOU ARE
- 7+ years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years managing or tech-leading a team
- Deep, hands-on experience with identity and auth systems; you've built or operated SAML, OIDC, and SCIM integrations in production and can reason about the security and UX tradeoffs
- Strong product sense for B2B