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 s