About Nametag
Nametag is building the future of secure digital identity. Our mission is to make it easy for people and organizations to prove who they are online, safely and seamlessly. We're pioneering next-generation identity verification and account protection so that users can control their own identity, and companies can build trust without friction. By enabling trust at scale, we help enterprises reduce fraud, streamline onboarding, and deliver secure user experiences that customers love.
The Role
We're looking for an engineering leader to own how Nametag's engineering team works — how it plans, ships, operates, and grows.
This is a player-coach role on a small, senior team. You'll manage a group of staff- and senior-level engineers working across a Go backend on AWS, a React/TypeScript frontend, native mobile clients, and the ML systems behind our fraud detection. You will not be writing most of the code, but you need to be able to read it, review it, and hold a credible opinion in a design discussion. Engineers here are experienced and autonomous; they want a manager who removes obstacles and raises the bar, not one who assigns tickets.
You'll own delivery end to end: what the team commits to, whether it lands, and what we learn when it doesn't. You'll partner closely with product and with the CEO on roadmap and tradeoffs, and you'll be accountable for the operational health of a platform that enterprises depend on for account security.
We're a security company, which changes the job. Our failure modes are adversarial, not accidental. Reliability, incident response, and secure-by-default engineering are not a separate workstream you delegate — they're part of how the team ships.
We're also an AI-native engineering org. Our engineers work alongside coding agents daily, and we invest in the tooling, context, and review practices that make that productive rather than reckless. You'll be expected to have a point of view on how a team should actually work in that environment.
The title flexes with experience. For a candidate who has run an engineering organization before — owning hiring, structure, and technical strategy across multiple teams — this is a Head of Engineering role.
What you’ll doLead the team
Manage, coach, and grow a team of senior and staff engineers, including regular 1:1s, feedback, and performance and promotion decisions.
Set expectations clearly and address problems early. Protect the team's focus and its standards with equal energy.
Grow people deliberately — career paths, stretch work, and the honest conversations that make either one meaningful.
Own delivery
Run planning and execution so the team ships predictably: clear scope, visible progress, and no surprises at the end of a quarter.
Make and communicate tradeoffs between speed, quality, and scope, and be accountable for the call.
Unblock work. Escalate the things that need escalating and absorb the rest.
Own operational health
Be accountable for reliability, on-call, and incident response for the systems your team owns.
Drive postmortems that change something. Treat a repeat incident as a process failure, not bad luck.
Keep security and compliance obligations — SOC 2, customer commitments, secure development lifecycle — as part of normal engineering work rather than an annual scramble.
Partner across the company
Work with product and design to turn a roadmap into a sequenced, buildable plan.
Represent engineering to customers, prospects, and the exec team, including in the technical conversations that close enterprise deals.
Translate between what customers need and what the architecture will actually support.
Hire and build the org
Own engineering hiring: sourcing, interview design, calibration, and closing.
Raise the quality of the bar and the fairness of the process at the same time.
Design team structure and ownership boundaries as the org grows.
Shape how the team engineers
Set and enforce the standards — code review, testing, deployment, documentation, architectural decision records — that let a small team move fast without breaking trust.
Define how the team uses AI tooling responsibly: where agents accelerate work, where a human stays accountable, and what review looks like in between.
Make the build, test, and deploy path something engineers trust. Developer experience is a leadership responsibility.
What You BringWork authorization required: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without current or future need for visa sponsorship.
You do not need to match every bullet. We care most about judgment, ownership, and evidence that teams get better under your leadership.
Minimum Qualifications:
- 3+ years managing software engineers, including senior and staff-level ICs, with a track record of shipping production systems.
- A strong engineering background of your own — you've built and operated backend or distributed systems at scale, and you can still hold your own in a design review.
- Experience owning delivery for a team: planning, prioritization, and accountability for outcomes rather than activity.
- Experience running on-call and incident response for a production system with real availability expectations.
- Demonstrated hiring success — you've built an interview process, not just sat on panels.
- Comfort operating at startup scope: ambiguous problems, shifting priorities, and no one else to hand the hard thing to.
- Strong written communication. We're remote-first, and decisions that aren't written down didn't happen.
Bonus Points
- Experience in security, identity, fraud, or infrastructure-adjacent B2B SaaS.
- Experience with Go, AWS, and a services architecture.
- Experience scaling an engineering org through a growth stage — adding teams, layers, or a second manager.
- Experience with SOC 2 or similar compliance regimes as an engineering leader rather than a bystander.
- A real point of view, informed by practice, on how AI coding tools change engineering process and quality.
What we value
- High ownership. You see what needs doing and do it.
- Technical judgment. You make systems simpler, safer, and easier to operate.
- Speed with care. We move quickly because attackers move quickly, but we do not cut corners on trust or security.
- Knowledge compounds. What one person learns should be available to everyone, and to the tools we work alongside.
- Kindness and integrity. Trust starts with how we work with each other.
- Intellectual horsepower. Quickly grasping complex technical and business concepts.
- Kindness and integrity. Earning trust is central to how we build relationships with customers and colleagues.
- Bias for action. We move quickly to deliver impact and protect our customers against fast-moving threats.
- Ownership mindset. You care about uptime and stability the way a founder cares about the product.
At Nametag, we believe trust starts with how we treat each other. We're a remote-first team that values autonomy, inclusivity, and collaboration, with regular in-person time to stay connected and innovate together.
- Remote-first: Work from anywhere in the US. Our team spans Seattle, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Denver, New York City, and beyond.
- Off-sites: We bring the team together once per quarter for in-person collaboration, often off-site in new places.
- Flexible schedules: Work in your own time zone; we align key meetings across a shared window.
- Competitive salary
- Meaningful equity ownership
- Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision)
- Flexible paid time off
- Quarterly team off-sites and travel support
- New computer hardware and equipment
- An inclusive environment where your voice has impact and your work drives change
