Founding Technical Project Manager

Full-time  ·  3-month contract-to-hire structure ·  Remote (US time zones)  ·  $60–$75/hour during contract phase  ·  $120,000–$130,000 base.

About Acrivault

Acrivault is an early-stage cybersecurity SaaS company headquartered in Houston, Texas. We are building the AI-Native Non-Human Identity (NHI) Security Platform purpose-designed for mid-market technology, financial services, healthcare, and defense companies. Our architecture ships AI-native from the foundation: agent session replay, an AI Bill of Materials lineage graph, sub-millisecond prompt-injection detection, and SPIFFE-based workload attestation, all enforced within a 4.5-millisecond p99 authorization budget. We are at the founding stage and hiring the team that will define the company for the next decade.

About this role

We are hiring our Founding Technical Project Manager — the first dedicated project-management hire at Acrivault and the person who will run every cross-functional project in the company through its first eighteen months. You will own engineering project coordination across the twenty microservices and five engineering pillars, the SOC 2 audit timeline, hiring operations, vendor selection, compliance roadmap delivery, customer onboarding logistics, marketing launch coordination, and the operating cadence that connects the founder, the engineering team, customers, and external partners.

This is a full-time, full-scope Technical Project Manager role — not a coordinator, not a scrum master, not a junior PM. You will own real outcomes, drive real delivery against real deadlines, and be measured on whether projects ship on time and at quality.

What you’ll do

  • Engineering project management (30% of time).  Run weekly engineering planning across the four delivery waves (Wave 1 Discovery, Wave 2 Governance, Wave 3 Identity Firewall, Wave 4 AI Intelligence), daily standup facilitation, and Linear backlog management. Accept deliverables against the architect’s fourteen written deliverables. Coordinate cross-team dependencies. Run blameless post-mortems.
  • Compliance project management (25%).  Own Day-1 NIST CSF 2.0 baseline and HIPAA-readiness through the Tier 8 Compliance & Residency primitives. Own the SOC 2 Type 1 audit (Month 6), SOC 1 Type 1 (Month 9), SOC 2 Type 2 + ISO 27001 (Month 12), HITRUST i1 + PCI-DSS (Months 16-18), and FedRAMP Moderate + CMMC Level 2 (Months 22-24). Manage auditor relationships and customer security questionnaire SLA.
  • Hiring operations (15%).  Source candidates, conduct phone screens, schedule technical interviews, manage interview scorecards, run reference checks, manage offer logistics, and maintain hiring pipeline metrics.
  • Vendor and tooling selection (10%).  Run vendor selection for compliance automation, EOR, payroll, legal, accounting, and major SaaS tooling. Build comparison matrices, negotiate pricing, and maintain the SaaS renewal calendar.
  • Customer operations and design-partner onboarding (10%).  From Month 6 onward, coordinate design partner onboarding, weekly check-ins, quarterly business reviews, customer support triage, and the agent session replay demo (the v2 architecture’s marquee differentiator).
  • Marketing, launch, finance, and founder support (10% combined).  Website refresh cadence, public launch coordination (Month 9-12), conference logistics, social media calendar, monthly close with the fractional CFO, equity grant administration, founder calendar, and communications support.

Required qualifications

  • 5+ years of Technical Project Management experience at a venture-backed software company, with at least 2 years in cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, identity, or developer tooling.
  • Direct experience driving a SOC 2 audit to certification (Type 1 or Type 2). You have sat across from an auditor and led evidence collection.
  • Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional projects across engineering, product, security, sales, and external auditors — without the team reporting to you.
  • Fluency with engineering tooling: Linear or Jira, GitHub, Slack, Notion, Google Workspace. You read pull requests, understand sprint trade-offs, and can intelligently discuss roadmap risks.
  • Excellent written communication. You will draft a lot of communication on the founder’s behalf — investor updates, candidate rejections, customer follow-ups.
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguity. The founder will not always have time to brief you. You will need to read documents, ask sharp questions, and make calls.

Strongly preferred

  • Prior chief-of-staff, BizOps, or founding-team experience at a Seed or Series A company.
  • Exposure to HITRUST, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, or CMMC compliance frameworks.
  • Experience with AI-native or AI agent infrastructure (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP servers, Bedrock, Anthropic SDK).
  • Familiarity with the NHI security category: machine identities, service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, AI agent identities.

Compensation and structure

  • Full-time: $120,000-$130,000 base salary, full-time W-2 employee.
  • Full health, dental, and vision benefits. Unlimited PTO with 20-day minimum. $3,000 annual professional development budget. $1,500 home-office stipend.

How to apply

Send a single email to the application address on this posting. Include: (1) a one-page resume or LinkedIn URL, (2) two concrete examples of cross-functional projects you have driven to completion (a sentence or two per example — outcome, your role, the obstacle you cleared), (3) a short answer to the question “how do you organize your own work?” — describe your personal Notion, Linear, Things, or paper system. The way you organize yourself predicts how you will organize Acrivault. Do not send a cover letter or a generic application — the TPM role is high signal, and the application itself is the first interview.