Director of Software Engineering

Director of Software Engineering | Nox Metals | Detroit, MI

American factories deserve a supply chain that moves as fast as they do. The next generation of American manufacturing is being built right now. Nox Metals is the supply chain behind it.

Nox Metals is a technology company in Detroit supplying aluminum plate, bar, and rounds to aerospace and defense manufacturers. We use software and automation to supply metal to American factories faster than the industry thought possible.

We need a Director of Software Engineering to lead the team building the systems that run the company. Our software is not a side project, it is the product. NOX NEST runs the factory floor, WAYNE runs nesting and quoting, Gondor runs the customer experience, MORIA runs inventory and demand intelligence. Every shipment we send goes out because of code we wrote. This role owns the engineering org, the roadmap, and the team that builds it. Nox Metals is an employer with real opportunity for long term career growth, this is a place to build a career, not just hold a job.

You will:

• Lead, hire, and grow the engineering team across NOX NEST, WAYNE, Gondor, and MORIA

• Own the engineering roadmap end to end, set priorities, ship on time

• Stay hands on, write code, review PRs, pair with engineers on the hardest problems

• Work directly with the founder to translate company strategy into engineering execution

• Walk the floor every week and make sure the team is building what the business actually needs

• Set the bar for code quality, system design, deploy hygiene, on call, and production reliability

• Run the hiring loop, close candidates, and onboard new engineers fast

• Drive real ML and AI features into production, cut time models, demand intelligence, AI parsing of sales orders, agentic workflows across the company

• Own production systems, incident response, postmortems, and the culture of fix forward

• Make the team faster every quarter, better tools, better workflows, better leverage on AI

• Look at every system and figure out how to make it better

• Work safely every shift and hold the team to the same standard

You should be:

• 7+ years of engineering experience with 2+ years leading and managing a team

• Track record of shipping production software at a startup, ideally scaled a team from a handful to 10+ engineers

• Strong in TypeScript, Node, and modern web frameworks (NestJS, Next.js, React, or comparable)

• Deep experience with Postgres, Supabase, or comparable database and backend platforms

• Still writes production code and wants to

• Cracked with AI tools, you use them every day and you have figured out how to make a whole team 10x more efficient with them

• A builder at heart, you would rather ship a working v1 today than ship a perfect v3 next month, and you instill that in the team

• Strong product instincts, you sit with a customer or an operator and turn what you see into a roadmap

• A great manager of engineers, you grow people, you give hard feedback, you set a high bar, and people want to work for you

• Comfortable working close to the metal, the floor, the customer, the operator, your team writes software that lives in the real world and you lead from the front

• Relentless on quality, every PR, every deploy, every customer-facing experience

• Always thinking about how to make systems better, you do not accept "this is how we have always done it"

• Absolutely customer obsessed, every line of code your team ships eventually shows up as a part on a customer's dock

• User obsessed, you sit with the operator, the scheduler, the buyer, you watch them work, and you build software they actually want to use

• A team player with a good attitude, you make the team better for everyone around you

• Someone who takes ownership of the whole engineering org, if it is in production, it is your responsibility

• Precise under pressure and reliable

• Organized and detail oriented

• Committed to safety, you follow every protocol, wear your PPE, and never cut corners that put people at risk

• High agency, you handle big items alone and ask for help when needed

• Low ego, you walk the floor, you talk to operators, you do the unglamorous work because it needs to get done

• Not afraid to work outside normal hours when America demands it

• Never says "that's not my job"

Nice to have:

• Experience leading software teams in manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, or industrial environments

• Background with 2D bin packing, optimization, scheduling algorithms, or operations research

• Background with ML, applied AI, or data-heavy product work

• Experience integrating with hardware, PLCs, CNC controllers, or shop floor systems

• Experience standing up engineering practices from scratch, on call, code review, deploy, observability, security

• Strong design sensibility, you can ship a UI that looks as good as it works

• Open source work or a portfolio of things you and your teams have built

This role is full time, in person in Detroit.