Tech Lead Manager, Foundations

Profound is the marketing platform for the AI era. As people increasingly turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to decide what to buy, we give brands the intelligence to see how AI represents them and the Agents to act on it. Today, ~13% of the Fortune 500, plus companies like Ramp, Figma, Chime, Calendly, and DocuSign, use Profound to turn AI Search from a black box into a measurable growth channel.

Backed by Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Khosla Ventures at a $1B valuation, we're a lean, fast-moving team across NYC, SF, Buenos Aires, and London, shipping at a relentless pace and defining a new category at the biggest shift in marketing in 25 years. If you want to do the best work of your career at the frontier of AI, come build it with us.

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 SaaS; you understand the differences between self-serve and enterprise motions and can design systems that serve both without forking the codebase

• Strong Postgres skills; 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 manage; 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)

• Familiarity with WorkOS or similar identity platforms

• Experience designing audit and activity log systems that meet enterprise compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001)

• Experience standing up admin and internal tooling that engineering doesn't have to babysit

Location

This is an on-site role based in our SF office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact.

For this role, the expected base salary range is $230,000 to $275,000, depending on experience. Profound's total compensation package includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring.

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Note: All official communication from Profound will come from a @tryprofound.com email address. If you're contacted by anyone using a different domain, please disregard and report it as spam.