Tech Lead Manager, Context

About the role

Profound is the marketing platform for the age of AI search. We built the platform marketers use to understand, measure, and win in the world of AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode—the analytics, intelligence, and agent automation that turn AI search from a threat into a competitive advantage. We went from 0 to a $1B valuation in 18 months, with revenue growing 100x last year. Our customers include 15% of the Fortune 500 (e.g., Walmart, Wayfair, U.S. Bank) and innovators like Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. We are backed by Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, LSVP, and Khosla Ventures.

We are hiring a Tech Lead Manager to build and lead our Context team in San Francisco. Context owns everything Profound knows about a customer and everything our agents reach for when they do work. Every integration, document, entity, and piece of durable memory runs through this team. If our agents are the hands, Context is the memory and the senses. The quality of what we ship is bounded by the quality of the context we retrieve.

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 deeply involved in critical decisions, while also growing engineers, running a tight planning process, and owning outcomes for the team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Context 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: retrieval quality and how we measure it, graph and memory schemas, sync architectures, and an integration framework that makes connectors cheaper to build over time
• Own retrieval quality as a measurable product surface, with evals that catch regressions before customers do
• Ship code yourself on the highest-leverage parts of the system
• Be the engineering point of contact when a customer's integration breaks, their data goes stale, or an agent retrieves the wrong thing
• Represent Context in conversations with product, sales engineering, and the executive team when data access, freshness, or security commitments are on the line
• Partner closely with the teams building our agent products, who are your primary internal customers

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years managing or tech-leading a team
• Strong Python skills (the primary language of the team)
• Rust is strongly preferred for performance- and cost-sensitive parts of the system
• Hands-on experience building search or retrieval systems in production: embeddings, vector stores, hybrid search, reranking, and chunking strategies
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs at scale, including OAuth, token refresh, rate limits, and operational realities of connectors
• Experience with data synchronization and pipeline correctness: incremental sync, idempotency, backfills, and reconciliation
• Strong Postgres skills; ability to reason about indexes, query plans, multi-tenant data models, and migrations
• Experience hiring senior ICs and giving direct, useful feedback
• Comfortable being an IC contributor on the team you manage

Nice to Have

• Experience with knowledge graphs or entity resolution at scale
• Experience building memory systems or context management for LLM agents, including context budgeting and retrieval tuning
• Familiarity with MCP as both a server and a client implementer
• Experience with high-volume event ingestion and streaming systems
• Background at a B2B SaaS company that sold to enterprise, with experience passing security reviews (SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMEK, private networking)
• A track record of building evaluation harnesses for non-deterministic systems

What the Context team owns

• The integration service (shared substrate for connecting to third-party systems: OAuth flows, token lifecycle, API key management, MCP servers/clients, credential storage/rotation, webhook ingestion, and rate limiting)
• The integration catalog (CMS platforms, analytics consoles, CRMs, document stores, support desks, and commerce systems, each with unique auth models and failure modes)
• Knowledge base storage and retrieval (ingestion, chunking, embeddings, hybrid keyword/vector search, reranking, freshness, and tenant isolation across billions of documents)
• Data synchronization (incremental sync, backfills, change detection, deduplication, conflict resolution, and observability)
• Context management (the knowledge graph resolving brands, products, competitors, and topics, plus long-term memory for agents)

Location

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

Pay

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 skills, experience, qualifications, and location.