Director of Engineering

Job description

# Who are we? Antioch is the simulation platform for physical AI. We enable teams to develop, evaluate, and generate synthetic data for their physical systems in high-fidelity cloud simulation, accelerated by 3D-native agents. With Antioch, teams create precision-calibrated digital twins, generate high-fidelity testing environments, and run massively-parallel simulation scenarios in the cloud. By moving development out of the field and into software, Antioch drastically reduces dependence on expensive, slow, and incomplete real-world testing. We work with leading robotics, autonomy, and perception teams to make the deployment of physical autonomous systems safer, faster, and more cost-effective. # Who are we looking for? We're hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the core engineering of the Antioch platform. This includes the cloud infrastructure, scheduling and orchestration, data systems, and developer experience that enable our customers to run GPU-accelerated simulations at scale. Critically, this also includes the necessary tooling to keep our infrastructure reliable, affordable, and backwards compatible as usage continues to scale. This role sits on our leadership team. You'll define the technical direction, grow the team, and steer the engineering process itself. You'll also write a lot of code and build important parts of the system yourself. This is not a good role for someone who wants to be a pure people manager. We want an exceptional leader who loves hard engineering work, gets their hands dirty, moves fast, and is excited to be here. If you'd thrive in a fast-paced environment, such as Tesla or SpaceX, you'll likely thrive at Antioch. # What you'll do - Lead the core engineering team across infrastructure, backend, frontend, and developer experience, and ship critical platform components yourself. - Design and scale our GPU cloud platform, including scheduling and orchestration across GPU pools and clouds, large-scale data pipelining and storage, and complex networking. - Build the infrastructure for running large workloads reliably: distributed job execution and tracking, dataset and artifact versioning, and reproducible pipelines for our simulation, ML, and customer teams. - Own cost optimization, reliability, and scalability, including GPU utilization, compute spend, observability, on-call procedures, and incident response. - Hire excellent engineers and help them grow into high-agency team members that own systems end to end. - Help define how engineering works at Antioch, including code review, architecture decisions, releases, security and compliance, and planning. - Standardize how the Antioch team leverages coding agents to accelerate internal engineering work, and keep us at the frontier of agentic development. - Work with the founders and the simulation, ML, and GTM teams on the roadmap, and with customers on deployments, integrations, and escalations. You'll work alongside Antioch's founders, simulation engineers developing physics and sensor models, ML engineers working on calibration and learned simulation, technical artists creating simulation environments, and platform engineers building Antioch’s core systems. # What we're looking for You don't need to check every box. We're looking for strength in most of these areas: - 5+ years in engineering, including experience leading engineering teams at fast-growing companiesy. - Hands-on experience building and running GPU-accelerated systems at scale in the cloud, such as ML training and inference platforms, render farms, batch simulation, or high-performance computing. - A strong background in MLOps and distributed systems: Kubernetes, distributed compute and job scheduling (Ray, Slurm, or similar), and data pipelines. - Good judgment on performance and cost at scale, including GPU utilization, capacity planning, and compute spend across clouds. - You still write code regularly. Deep fluency in Python. Fluency in Rust, C++, or Go is a plus. - A track record of hiring and developing great engineers, including experience with hiring process design. - Fluent use of coding agents, agentic harnesses, and agentic DevOps tooling as a force multiplier on top of strong engineering fundamentals, not as a substitute for them. - Clear communication with customers, executives, and engineers. # Nice-to-haves - Experience at a fast-moving hardware company like Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril, or Waymo - Experience building GPU cloud or ML infrastructure products - Experience with robotics, autonomy, simulation, or 3D rendering pipelines (Isaac Sim, Omniverse, Unreal, or similar) - Experience shipping SDKs, APIs, CLIs, and technical documentation, that other engineers depend on. - Experience with enterprise compliance, security, and networking requirements, such as SOC 2, VPC or on-prem deployments, or government and defense customers - Experience building MCP servers, agent tool interfaces, or LLM eval harnesses # You may be a great fit if… - You're in NYC or open to relocating - You'd rather lead by doing the work with your team than by managing from a distance - You get excited about hard problems and work with urgency - You're a high-agency builder: you don't wait to be told what to do, you go figure it out - You care deeply about what you ship and reflexively take accountability - You thrive in the 0 → 1 environment and choose it on purpose - You balance craft and pragmatism: you push for excellence, but ship what's needed now - You're customer-obsessed and care about making the product work for real users # Why Antioch - Real problems, real stakes. Our customers build physical autonomous systems that have to behave correctly in the real world, and our work directly affects whether they get there. - Build the company, not just the product. As part of the leadership team, you'll help shape company strategy, engineering culture, and product direction. - High ownership. You'll own systems end-to-end rather than narrow tasks, with fast iteration and direct customer feedback. - Team caliber. Work with a founding team who have previously built and sold companies, and worked at leading companies like Tesla Autopilot, Meta Reality Labs, and more. - Build the company, not just the product. Early team members help define engineering culture, product direction, and how we win. # Interview Process 1. Introductory call 2. Technical Interview (a sample technical and programming interview that closely emulates work you'll do in the role. 3. Project Deep Dive (a detailed discussion of one of your past projects, with an emphasis on leading larger scale engineering efforts) 4. Onsite at Antioch HQ in New York City