Director of Software Engineering
Job Location:
New York City, NY - USA
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
Job Summary
Were a small senior team growing fast. This is a foundational hire.
Were 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: youll ship code every week while also owning the teams growth culture processes and long-term technical direction.
Youll 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. Its for someone who wants to be in the middle of them.
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 13 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
- 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 wont 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
- 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)
This role is NYC-based and requires consistent in-person presence. Were 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
Required Experience:
Director
