Salary :
Activate JobCopilot
We're a small, senior team, growing fast. This is a foundational hire.
The Role
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
Lead the team:
- 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
Stay technical:
- 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
Shape the roadmap:
- 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
Manage up and across:
- 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
What We're Looking For
Required:
- 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.
What We Offer
- 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
Disclosure
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