Director, Software Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Guide and assist engineering managers by providing context, support, expectations, cross-team unblocking, and accountability.

• Recruit additional engineering managers as the organization expands.

• Collaborate with the CTO and fellow directors to design and scale the engineering organization.

• Determine the timing and methodology for team splits and define architecture-oriented team boundaries.

• Develop and enhance engineering hiring and onboarding processes.

• Ensure product delivery is predictable and report progress based on outcomes reaching farms.

• Safeguard the investment in platform and infrastructure while focusing on customer-facing work.

• Establish standards for AI-native engineering, encompassing specifications, evaluations, testing, CI, and security.

• Assess where coding agents should be utilized and enhance specifications or harnesses when agent output is inadequate.

• Create escalation paths, incident response protocols, release discipline, and clarity of ownership.

• Influence technical leveling, planning cycles, and performance review frameworks.

• Collaborate with Product, Hardware, Farm Success, Farm Ops, and science teams.

• Participate in farm visits and maintain close relationships with customers.

• Oversee software development while reporting directly to the CTO.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering, with more than 5 years in managing engineers and at least 2 years in managing managers.

• Achieved a senior engineering role as an individual contributor prior to management.

• Proven history of scaling a startup engineering organization through a growth phase, ideally from approximately 10 to over 30 engineers.

• Experience in splitting teams and introducing a management layer during organizational growth.

• Successful in hiring or promoting managers and nurturing them into effective leaders.

• Background in developing engineering hiring processes, calibrating interviewers, and securing senior candidates.

• Experience in overseeing delivery across multiple products or teams simultaneously.

• Ability to balance customer-facing roadmap tasks with platform and infrastructure investments.

• Strong expertise in AI-native engineering, including specification-first and agentic development, specifications, evaluations, verification, and quality assurance.

• Utilizes AI daily in leadership responsibilities.

• Experience in forming strong partnerships with product leaders.

• Collaborated with hardware or science leaders to deliver products that integrate physical devices, data, and software.

• Exceptional written communication skills and sound judgment to report status, risks, and trade-offs to the CTO, CEO, and board.

• Applicants must have authorization to work in the United States.

• Availability to work ideally during west coast hours.

• Preferred: experience leading ML, data-intensive, or decision-support products; platform re-architecture; software/hardware, sensors, or edge computing; remote-first engineering teams; agriculture, biology, genomics, or physical industries.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity options.

• Medical coverage.

• Dental coverage.

• Vision coverage.

• 401(k).

• Flexible PTO.

• Paid parental leave, which includes up to twelve weeks of paid leave and/or coordination of supplemental pay with applicable state benefits.

• Pet insurance.

• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment.

• Reasonable accommodations provided throughout the application and interview process.