Director of Software Engineering (Emeryville)

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.

What We Offer

A competitive compensation package also includes the best in benefits:

• 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
• 401(k)
• Equity

Disclosure

Radical AI is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital status, disability, or veteran status.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.