Head of Software Engineering New York City On-site $237,000 - $340,000 · per year · USD

Compensation $237,000 – $340,000 per year USD

About Radical AI

Radical AI is a materials company replacing the R&D process that currently takes 10 years and $100 million to produce a single discovery. Instead of leaving world-changing industries like aerospace, automotive, energy, manufacturing, semiconductors, and space to engineer around material shortcomings, Radical invents new materials for specific performance goals in a matter of weeks. This acceleration of research is fueled by scientific agents that simulate novel compositions and then send them directly into an automated lab for physical synthesis, characterization, and validation.

We're a small, senior team, growing fast. This is a foundational hire.

The Role

We're looking for a Head 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 ship code every week, and you own the team's growth, culture, processes, and long-term technical direction. You ship fast, iterate in public, and don't wait for consensus.

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, and who's comfortable making calls with incomplete information.

What You'll 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; ship production code weekly, with a bias toward shipping over perfecting
• 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 — and default to speed when the tradeoff is close

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:

• 8-15 years of software engineering experience, with current hands‑on shipping (not just review and sign‑off)
• Has built or scaled an engineering team from under 15 people in a startup or similarly fast‑moving environment within the last 5 years
• 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
• 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

Not the right fit if:

• You're coming from a large, process‑mature engineering org without recent experience shipping in a fast, ambiguous, resource‑constrained environment
• You default to extensive review cycles or consensus‑building before moving — this team makes real‑time tradeoffs without established playbooks

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.

Compensation

$237,000 - $340,000 base + equity + benefits

Compensation varies based on experience and scope. We offer 100% employer‑covered medical, dental, and vision insurance, unlimited PTO, 14+ company holidays, 401(k), and mental health support.

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Radical AI is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, disability, or veteran status.