Head of Software Engineering

Search Atlas • TX

80d • $150,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Hi, we’re Search Atlas! We’re a rapidly growing SEO software company and full-service digital agency that helps websites improve their Google performance. From Fortune 500 companies to Silicon Valley startups, our clients trust us to drive results. We’re hiring a Head of Engineering to own the architectural health, scalability, and performance of our SEO platform. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who thrives in fast-paced startup environments yet brings the rigor and best practices learned from larger organizations. You will partner with the VP of Engineering to set the technical direction of our platform, oversee refactoring initiatives, and lead efforts to optimize infrastructure, performance, and code quality across all services. Your mission is to make our systems faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain, enabling product teams to move quickly without compromising long-term stability. This is a hands-on leadership position. You will dive deep into complex backend systems, review critical code paths, and guide large-scale refactors, while also mentoring engineers and enforcing architectural standards. You will have a strong backend foundation in Python/Django, solid infrastructure skills, and the flexibility to adapt solutions pragmatically in a startup context. You’ll also come with a strong interest in cutting edge marketing technology in SEO, PPC, and AI / LLM Optimization (GEO).

Requirements

• 7+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years of backend Python/Django experience
• 3+ years in a technical leadership role (Head of Engineering, Principal Engineer, or Tech Lead)
• Proven experience leading large-scale refactoring and optimization projects
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise, including indexing, query optimization, and schema design
• Proficiency in Celery or similar distributed task processing systems
• Strong infrastructure foundation, containerization (Docker), CI/CD, Kubernetes familiarity, monitoring, and alerting
• Experience with observability tools like Sentry, Datadog, and Grafana
• Startup experience and exposure to larger organizations, with the ability to blend agility with engineering best practices
• Excellent communication and mentorship skills in distributed teams

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, or other large-scale data systems
• Experience with Next.js or modern frontend frameworks (for cross-stack awareness)
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures or AI-powered systems, knowledge of Cursor and AI a strong bonus
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture at scale

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain long-term platform architecture and establish coding standards across engineering teams
• Lead large-scale refactoring projects to improve maintainability, scalability, and performance
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across API, database, and infrastructure layers
• Optimize task queues, background processing, caching, and deployment pipelines
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to senior engineers, ensuring high-quality, maintainable code
• Collaborate with infrastructure teams on observability, reliability, security, and cost-efficient scaling
• Lead incident postmortems with root-cause analysis and long-term fixes
• Stay hands-on with coding, prototyping, debugging, and adapting to changing priorities with high-leverage solutions

Benefits

• Fully Remote work
• Fully covered health, vision, and dental insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Paid parental leave
• Personal development budget
• Lasik eye surgery benefit (Yup, we'll pay for you to have perfect vision!)
• Pet health insurance (2 pets per employee)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees