Director of Software Engineering

Job description

**Radical AI** is replacing an R&D process that currently takes 10+ years and $100 million to produce a single discovery. Our self-driving lab platform combines AI with autonomous robotics to run experiments, analyze results, and iterate—continuously, without human bottlenecks. For industries like aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, manufacturing, semiconductors, and space, that means breakthroughs in weeks instead of years. 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.