Tech Lead - ToolHound

TECH LEAD — TOOLHOUND (EMBEDDED, BEACON SOFTWARE) WHERE THE WORK IS Beacon buys great vertical software businesses and makes them dramatically more valuable, not by squeezing them, but by giving them world-class engineering and AI leadership they could never hire on their own. Our engineers go where the work is: embedded inside a single business, owning its technology end to end, and compounding its enterprise value quarter over quarter. This role is one of those seats. You will be the technical leader for ToolHound, a mature, profitable tool-and-asset-management platform used by industrial, construction, energy, and manufacturing customers to track where every tool and asset is, who has it, and what it costs them. You won't advise from the outside. You'll own the codebase, set the roadmap, lead the team, and be measured on the value you create. This is an AI-native rebuild, not maintenance. ToolHound is a profitable, established platform, and the mandate is to reimagine what it does with AI at the center, and you're the technical leader who owns that from the front. We're looking for a jack of all trades, a strong generalist who can go deep where it counts. Deep, current .NET expertise is the price of entry, because that's what ToolHound is built on today. Over time, ToolHound converges onto Beacon's shared engineering standards, and you'll be the one leading that journey. The right person is excited by both, mastering the stack in front of them and growing into a broader one. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the technical and product roadmap. Decide what gets built and why, in partnership with the GM and customers. Translate business priorities (retention, expansion, new verticals, operational leverage) into a sequenced engineering plan you're accountable for. - Drive everything technical. Architecture, code quality, security, data modeling, performance, release engineering, and the migration path. You set the bar and you'll make the final technical decision. - Ship AI that changes the business, not demos. Take the natural-language assistant and the broader AI surface from plan to production: evals, guardrails, tenant-safe tool use, and features customers feel. You know when to lean on a foundation model, when to fine-tune, and how to keep agentic workflows on the rails in a multi-tenant system. - Lead and grow the team. Mentor the current engineer, raise their ceiling, and establish the best practices. - Increase velocity and harden the codebase. Make shipping faster and safer: modernize the stack, tighten the SQL and data layer, invest in test coverage and automation, and pay down risk so the platform can carry far more weight than it does today. - Be the technical face of ToolHound. Earn the trust of operators and customers, set expectations, and communicate clearly in writing. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - A senior .NET expert — day one. Deep, current C# / ASP.NET http://ASP.NET Core (through .NET 8–10), comfortable owning a large, mature codebase immediately: reading it, fixing it, and reshaping it with judgment. This is the non-negotiable starting requirement. - A genuine generalist ("jack of all trades"). You're T-shaped, deep in .NET now, but you pick up new languages, stacks, and clouds quickly and enjoy it. You can move across web, mobile, data, infra, and AI without waiting for permission, and you're energized (not threatened) by converging onto TypeScript/React, Go, Python, and AWS over time. - Cloud and SQL depth. You've designed, deployed, and operated real systems in the cloud, and can model, query, tune, and reason about production databases. - Mobile fluency. Hands-on with cross-platform mobile: .NET MAUI (or Xamarin/ native, with the ability to go deep on MAUI), including scanning, camera, and offline sync. - AI-native engineering. You've shipped production software on foundation models (LLM tool use, retrieval, evals, guardrails), not just prototypes, and you have a point of view on doing it safely in a multi-tenant produc