Tech Lead

About Pryzm

America wastes time and money when the right capabilities don’t reach the right missions fast enough. Pryzm is fixing that. We’re building the AI operating system for federal procurement and capture -- used by both government and industry -- to unify workflows, market and budget intelligence, human context, and real-time program awareness into one actionable picture. Our team comes from Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and high-tempo startups; we ship secure, reliable software that moves real programs forward.

If you want your code to matter to national security outcomes, join us.

The Role

I’m hiring a Software Engineering Lead to help me (the CTO) improve how federal tech gets delivered.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you’ll own critical systems end-to-end, set a high technical bar, and grow a team that ships with speed and rigor. We operate where it’s hardest -- security, reliability, scale, and clarity under ambiguity.

This role is ideal for a senior level individual contributor with demonstrated experience conducting code-reviews, mentoring junior developers and liaising across other business units.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design and development of complex, full-stack software systems, contributing hands-on across the stack.

• Review code, maintain high engineering standards, and mentor engineers through technical guidance and feedback.
  Scope and design scalable system architectures, ensuring reliability, performance, and maintainability.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with teams such as Sales, Mission Ops, and Marketing to align product delivery with customer and business needs.

• Drive development workflows and release coordination, ensuring smooth deployments and high-quality production systems.

• Contribute to building modern AI-enabled products, including backend services, workflows, and integrations with LLM-powered systems.

• Help grow the engineering team by participating in hiring and technical interviews.

What We're Looking For

• Led teams building or personally built complex, distributed systems with real users and uptime requirements.

• Demonstrated mastery in at least one of our core areas:

  • Backend/Data: APIs, ETL

  • Frontend: UI/UX

  • Search/Analytics: PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, schema design, relevance tuning.

• Designed resilient architectures: clear boundaries, smooth releases, and instrumentation that catches issues before users do.

• Communicated clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You can argue from first principles and then ship the pragmatic thing..

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership on complex systems or products.

• A hands-on engineer who still enjoys coding while taking on leadership responsibilities.

• Background as a Tech Lead, Senior/Staff Engineer, early engineer at a high-growth startup, or founder/co-founder of a startup.

• Experience building modern web applications with frameworks such as React or Next.js, with strong product intuition and UX/design sensibility.

• Backend expertise with modern frameworks such as Django, FastAPI, or Node.js, along with strong SQL and system design fundamentals.

• Experience building or integrating AI/LLM-powered systems or workflows

• Familiarity with modern infrastructure and tooling such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, along with workflow or systems tooling (e.g., Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, Redis, OAuth).

• Bonus experience with distributed systems, ETL/data pipelines, DevOps tooling (Kubernetes, Helm), or mobile development.

• Strong communicator who is comfortable collaborating with cross-functional teams and occasionally engaging with customers.

• Motivated, intellectually curious, and driven to build exceptional products with a high-performing team.

• Located in or willing to relocate to Boston, MA.

• US Person.

• Veterans strongly encouraged to apply.

Benefits

Pryzm offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Equity opportunity.

• Platinum Healthcare: comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents, fully covered by Pryzm.

• Basic Life/AD&D and long-term disability insurance fully covered, with the option to purchase additional life insurance for you and your dependents.

• Relocation assistance available.