Head of Engineering, Platform and Operations

Head of Engineering, Platform and Operations | Symbium

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Head of Engineering, Platform and Operations

Reports To: CTO, CEO

Location: San Francisco, CA

Reinventing Government Interactions for a Sustainable Future

At Symbium, were on a mission to streamline how citizens interact with local government and cut through the red tape in permitting processes. Imagine a world where homeowners and contractors can effortlessly navigate complex regulations, instantly determine what projects are possible on their property, and secure approvals with the click of a button. Symbium is making that world a reality. By transforming dense rules into user-friendly software, we empower people to get work done without frustration and delay.

Symbiums proprietary computational law (Complaw) technology - initially developed at Stanfords AI Lab - performs permit compliance checks in real time, enabling instant permit approvals. Symbium is currently partnered with 270+ cities - and growing fast. Our platform accelerates clean energy adoption by simplifying approvals for installations of solar panels, reroofing, and EV chargers to heat pumps and beyond. This streamlined process helps communities transition more quickly to decarbonization and energy independence.

The Opportunity

Symbium is looking for a Head of Engineering, Platform and Operations to own our infrastructure architecture, deployment systems, observability stack, and engineering platform end-to-end. This is a hands-on senior technical role, closer to Staff or Principal Platform Engineer than to engineering management. You report directly to the CTO and set the technical direction for how Symbiums systems are built, deployed, and operated in production.

The skills required for this role are specialized to the platform itself. Symbium builds on Complaw, a proprietary technology in which laws and regulations are encoded directly in a logic programming language, making compliance checks deterministic, verifiable, and auditable by design. Running this platform inside live government permitting systems, across jurisdictional data, local, statewide and national codes, construction plans, and legacy integrations, represents a novel class of engineering problems that no off-the-shelf platform or conventional DevOps practice addresses. Ensuring cohesion and engineering standards across the team follows naturally from this technical authority, not the other way around.

This role exists because those systems require someone with platform-scale judgment operating them directly. As part of that mandate, this role will lead and manage the engineers responsible for building, operating, and evolving the platform. You will set engineering standards, develop technical talent, and work closely with backend engineers on platform integration points to ensure the platform remains reliable, scalable, and aligned with company objectives.

The ideal candidate has built and operated platform systems through multiple growth stages, treats deployment safety and observability as engineering fundamentals rather than afterthoughts, and is most effective when closest to the system itself. If you want to own difficult infrastructure end-to-end, debug production failures at the terminal, and build the platform layer that mission-critical government-integrated workflows depend on, this role is for you.

Youll tackle challenging technical problems, collaborate with a passionate team, and expand your engineering skills in a supportive environment. If you love the idea of using technology to disrupt the status quo and make a positive impact on society, youll thrive in this role.

What youll do (Responsibilities)

• Build and own features:

• Design, build, and operate the AWS infrastructure that runs Symbiums computational law platform in production: compute orchestration (ECS/EKS), networking (VPC, ALB, CloudFront), data systems (RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, S3), secrets management (Secrets Manager, Parameter Store), and IAM.

• Manage all infrastructure as code across multi-environment configurations.

• Architect for multi-jurisdiction deployment requirements specific to Complaws operational model: tenant isolation, network segmentation, and data residency constraints for each government integration.

• Own database infrastructure with the precision that deterministic rule evaluation demands: schema migration engineering, query performance, index strategy, and safe schema evolution at production scale without correctness regressions.

• Design and maintain deployment systems and release engineering:

• Own the full CI/CD pipeline end-to-end: commit hooks, test gates, artifact management, environment promotion, and production deployment automation across all active jurisdictions.

• Design deployment systems that account for Complaws correctness requirements: first-class rollback capability, canary release support, and feature flag integration so that rule engine changes can be promoted and reverted safely.

• Define what "safe to ship" means for a platform where a deployment error can affect live government permitting workflows, and encode that definition into automated gates, not documentation.

• Drive release velocity without compromising the production stability that government integrations require.

• Build and operate the observability and reliability stack:

• Design the full observability layer for Complaw platform services: structured logging conventions, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry or equivalent), metric collection, alerting logic, and operational dashboards that surface rule engine behavior and integration health.

• Define SLOs for Symbiums customer-facing and government-integrated services. Instrument systems to surface degradation before it becomes a customer-visible or government-reported incident.

• Own incident response technically: root cause investigation, mitigation, and postmortem analysis for platform-layer failures, including failures in the deterministic inference pipeline and integrations with external government permitting systems.

• Define platform abstractions that support computational law workloads:

• Build and maintain the platform layer that application and Complaw engineers build on: authentication and authorization infrastructure, shared service patterns, background job systems for rule evaluation workloads, API gateway configuration, and cross-cutting concerns including rate limiting, circuit breakers, retry policies, and graceful degradation at system boundaries.

• Abstract infrastructure complexity away from engineers working on rule logic and jurisdiction-specific workflows. The platform layer should make Complaw development faster and less operationally fragile, not add to its cognitive overhead.

• Mentor and guide application and Complaw engineers on the effective adoption and utilization of platform abstractions and internal APIs to ensure consistency and accelerate development velocity.

• Build operational safeguards at external integration boundaries: input validation layers, idempotency guarantees, and alerting on invariant violations in data received from third-party government systems.

• Apply agentic engineering to platform and developer workflows:

• Build and integrate autonomous coding agents and LLM-driven pipelines that operate directly on Complaw platform code and infrastructure: agent-assisted code review, automated test generation for rule engine outputs, and deployment validation tooling.

• Apply agentic workflows where behavior is auditable and outcomes are measurable. The Complaw platforms correctness requirements make uncritical AI adoption a reliability risk, not a productivity shortcut.

• Continuously evaluate where agentic tooling raises the quality floor for platform engineering work and where it introduces unacceptable non-determinism.

• Debug production systems and drive operational maturity:

• Lead root cause analysis for production failures specific to the Complaw platform: rule engine performance regressions, data integrity issues in jurisdiction-specific datasets, latency anomalies, and integration failures with external government systems (Accela, Tyler Technologies, and legacy municipal APIs).

• Be the engineer who can sit at the terminal and determine what actually happened in a deterministic inference pipeline, without needing to escalate to the team that wrote the original rule logic.

• Continuously raise the operational floor: identify recurring failure patterns, build automated detection, and eliminate classes of incidents through platform-layer improvements specific to computational law workloads.

• Engineering leadership and management responsibilities:

• Lead, manage, mentor, and develop engineers responsible for platform and operations systems, including performance management.

• Set and enforce engineering standards across the team, including code review protocols, deployment procedures, and architectural conventions specific to the Complaw platform.

• Provide technical direction to backend engineers working on platform integration points, ensuring their work meets the correctness, reliability, and observability requirements the platform demands.

• Establish team priorities, coordinate execution, and ensure engineering resources are aligned with platform and operational objectives.

• Onboard engineers onto platform systems, tooling, and operational practices.

• Own hiring for platform and infrastructure engineering roles, including sourcing, interviewing, and selection.

Who were looking for (Qualifications)

We welcome deeply technical platform engineers who are excited by our mission and who want to own infrastructure and systems end-to-end at a company where the correctness and reliability of those systems has real consequences for people and governments. You might be a great fit if you have:

• Minimum 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 4 years in platform, infrastructure, or systems engineering roles at production scale, including designing, building, and operating systems end-to-end.
• A track record of individual contributor depth on platform and infrastructure systems, owning hard technical problems independently and delivering production-quality results without a dedicated team underneath you.
• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise: compute orchestration (ECS or EKS), relational databases (RDS/Aurora including migration engineering), caching (ElastiCache), CDN (CloudFront), IAM, VPC design, and secrets management.
• Infrastructure as code proficiency using Terraform, AWS CDK, or equivalent, with demonstrated experience managing multi-environment infrastructure configurations.
• Experience designing, building, and operating CI/CD systems end-to-end: pipeline architecture, test infrastructure, deployment automation, rollback mechanisms, and feature flag integration.
• Hands-on observability engineering: distributed tracing, structured logging, SLO definition, alerting system design, and operational dashboard construction using Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience with agentic engineering workflows: building or integrating autonomous coding agents, LLM-driven CI pipelines, agent-assisted code review, or tool-use systems that operate directly on codebases and infrastructure. Adopted where outcomes are measurable and behavior is auditable, not as a trend.
• The technical judgment to evaluate deployment safety, reliability tradeoffs, and operational risk, and to translate that judgment into engineering standards, tooling, and automated gates rather than only documentation.
• Production coding experience in Javascript and/or TypeScript: platform abstractions, internal developer tooling, and integration layers require writing real, maintainable production code.
• Experience operating systems through growth-stage transitions, not only greenfield builds or steady-state maintenance at large-company scale.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex distributed system failures: cascade failures, latency regressions, data consistency violations, and third-party integration failures, working from raw system signals.
• A high sense of ownership and operational accountability, especially in environments where failures have consequences beyond the engineering team.
• A Bachelors degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Prior experience as a founding, sole, or early platform engineer at a startup, responsible for the full infrastructure stack without a dedicated team underneath you.
• Experience in regulated industries (government technology, legal technology, fintech, or healthcare) where auditability, data integrity, and compliance constraints shape system design from the ground up.
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture experience, particularly tenant isolation at the data and network layer.
• Database performance engineering depth: query optimization, index design, migration safety, and schema evolution strategies at production scale.
• Security engineering fundamentals: secrets rotation, least-privilege IAM design, network egress control, and dependency vulnerability management.
• Familiarity with document processing pipelines, structured data extraction from PDFs, or OCR workflows.
• A Masters degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field.

Our Culture & Why Youll Love Symbium

• Mission with Impact: Your work will directly accelerate the adoption of clean energy and make government services more accessible. Every feature you build can help someone install solar panels, get an EV charger, or improve their home with less hassle. If youve wanted to do good with your coding skills, this is it.
• High-Ownership Environment: We believe in ownership and accountability. On our team, everyone trusts each other to deliver results. Youll have the freedom to innovate, make decisions, and drive projects, with the support of experienced mentors when you need it.
• Tight-Knit & Hands-On: We work side by side every day - C-level executives, engineers, and interns alike - sharing ideas and tackling problems together. Youll find us grabbing lunch together, debating product decisions, and jumping in wherever needed to keep things moving. Everyone has a voice, and we focus on collaboration and execution over titles and hierarchy.
• Competitive Benefits: We offer a competitive startup package, including:
• Competitive salary.
• Stock options in a growing, venture-backed company.
• Attractive 401k and health benefits.
• Working alongside a highly mission-driven, small, supportive team of ambitious, smart creatives in an environment that fosters continuous learning and adaptive problem solving. We turn complex challenges into beautiful, impactful solutions.

How to Apply

If Symbiums mission and team resonate with you, wed love to hear from you! To apply, please send an email to careers@symbium.com with your resume, LinkedIn information, and a brief note about why youre excited to join Symbium.

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis and be willing to relocate to California prior to the start of employment. Symbium does not provide visa sponsorships at this time.

Symbium is an equal opportunity employer.

Ready to get started?

Send an email to careers@symbium.com with your resume, LinkedIn information, and a brief statement of interest.

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