Software Engineer

Authorium•San Francisco, CA

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

Authorium is building the operating system for the infrastructure of democracy. We are a GovTech SaaS platform that unifies the massive, complex workflows—procurement, grants, and budgeting—that keep state and local governments running. Our platform replaces fragmented spreadsheets and decades-old legacy systems with a unified data layer that manages billions of dollars in public funds. We serve the agencies that support millions of citizens, including California’s CDSS, CalPERS, and EDD, as well as major state agencies in Florida and Washington. The Business: We are a 43-person company growing 45% YoY, with a clear path to profitability by Q4 2026. We have deep product market fit and are scaling to meet the demands of the world's most complex government agencies. Why This Role Exists We are establishing our San Francisco office as a strategic center for high-bandwidth engineering and product innovation. This is a foundational role for an engineer who thrives in an in-person, collaborative environment and wants to accelerate their career by being "in the room" where our most complex architectural decisions are made. While Authorium is a distributed company, our SF office is where we tackle our most intricate "war room" challenges—from modularizing our core domain to whiteboarding the next generation of our workflow engine. You will be a key contributor to the technical integrity of our platform, shipping mission-critical features and collaborating daily with a high-caliber team to power our next major phase of expansion.

Requirements

3+ years of professional full-stack experience. We value deep engineering fundamentals—system design, database optimization, and clean architecture—over fluency in any specific syntax.
Systems Thinker: A demonstrated ability to understand and contribute to complex domain objects and data models in production environments.
High-Agency: You don’t wait for a perfectly groomed ticket. You are comfortable partnering with product managers to turn ambiguous requirements into elegant technical specs.
Security Minded: You treat security as a core engineering discipline. You have a strong working knowledge of defensive coding practices and the authorization models required to protect sensitive data.
Quality Obsessed: A history of writing clean, maintainable code with comprehensive testing. You take pride in your PR history and believe that "done" includes documentation and observability.
San Francisco Based: Energized by an in-office (Monday–Thursday) collaborative culture.

Nice To Haves

Ruby on Rails Proficiency: Strong knowledge of Rails conventions and an interest in (or experience with) modular monoliths.
Complex Document Infrastructure: Experience with document generation (PDFs), rich text editors, or building systems to process unstructured data within secure workflows.
Regulated Industry Experience: Previous work in compliance-heavy environments such as GovTech, FinTech, or HealthTech (FedRAMP, SOC 2, or HIPAA).
Infrastructure Curiosity: Experience with or a strong desire to learn AWS infrastructure (ECS/EKS, CloudWatch) and modern deployment pipelines.
Startup Veteran: Previous experience in a fast-growing startup ($5M–$30M ARR range) where you navigated rapid change and contributed to a scaling product.

Responsibilities

Shipping Core Features: Deliver complex, high-impact features across our platform—from building robust versioning systems to designing intricate approval workflows and permission models.
Technical Evolution: Participate in architectural decisions that scale across multiple customer configurations. You’ll contribute to ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) and help drive the modularization of our core domain.
High-Bandwidth Collaboration: Work in-person (Monday–Thursday) in our SF office to whiteboard solutions, debug production bottlenecks, and move from idea to deployment at high velocity.
Engineering Craft: Uphold a high bar for technical excellence. You’ll engage in deep, architectural code reviews and contribute to the advancement of our automated quality gates.
AI-Native Workflow: Leverage Cursor and Claude to offload boilerplate and focus on complex implementation. You’ll help refine our AI-first patterns—including agentic testing and automated reviews—ensuring the team operates at maximum leverage.