We're a small, senior team, growing fast. This is a foundational hire.
We're looking for a Director of Software Engineering to build and lead the software engineering team as we scale. This is a player-coach role in the truest sense: you'll ship code every week while also owning the team's growth, culture, processes, and long-term technical direction.
You'll report to our President and Co-Founder, and work closely with cross-functional stakeholders across science, hardware, and product. The immediate mandate is to stabilize and grow a talented but lean team during a period of rapid hiring and technical expansion — including near-term customer deployments that involve significant architectural challenges.
This is not a role for someone who wants to delegate the hard technical problems. It's for someone who wants to be in the middle of them.
What You Will Do
- Hire, develop, and retain a high-caliber software engineering team
- Establish the rhythms that make the team hum: standups, planning, retrospectives, code review culture
- Be the person your engineers grow with — technically and professionally
- Conduct daily code reviews; submit 1–3 PRs per week
- Drive and participate meaningfully in architectural discussions and decisions
- Maintain deep enough fluency with the stack to debug production issues, challenge proposals, and earn your engineers' respect
- Build and own the long-term software development roadmap, in close partnership with our co-founder and the product team
- Translate ambiguous business and scientific requirements into clear technical strategy
- Navigate the tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and scale in a high-stakes, rapidly evolving environment
- Be a credible technical voice in leadership discussions — someone who can whiteboard a system design as easily as they can present a roadmap
- Interface with product, science, and hardware stakeholders effectively; understand what "customer-centric" actually means in a deep-tech context
Lead the team:
Stay technical:
Shape the roadmap:
Manage up and across:
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in an engineering management or technical lead role
- Still deeply hands-on: you write code, review code, and won't use a management title as a reason not to
- Strong systems thinking — you can design complex distributed systems under constraints and communicate tradeoffs clearly
- Experience growing and stabilizing engineering teams in fast-moving environments
- Fluency in Go and/or Python (our primary stack)
- Proven ability to establish processes that make teams faster without creating bureaucracy
- Based in — or willing to relocate to — New York City; this role requires regular in-person presence with the team Nice to have:
- Experience with hybrid cloud/on-prem deployments or customer-site delivery (hardware + software combined)
- Background in robotics, automation, scientific computing, or similarly constrained production environments
- Familiarity with agentic systems, LLM workflows, or AI-adjacent infrastructure
- Experience with containerization, Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation)
Work Arrangement
This role is NYC-based and requires consistent in-person presence. We're not looking for a remote or fractional arrangement — the team needs someone on the ground.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, covered at 100%
- Mental health and wellness support
- Unlimited PTO and 14+ company holidays per year
- Company-wide end-of-year shutdown, including two weeks of paid time off
- 401K
- Equity
Skills Required
- 10+ years of software engineering experience
- 3+ years in engineering management or technical lead role
- Fluency in Go and/or Python
What We Do
Through the integration of artificial intelligence, engineering, materials science, and applied research, we are changing the way materials are designed, developed, and discovered. In doing so we are tackling the world's most pressing problems.
Why Work With Us
We know what we are doing is hard. Really hard. We like that. As a team of deep domain experts, we trust each other and all move with autonomy. It won’t always look perfect —that’s the price of moving fast. But we prize execution above all else.
