Head of Software Engineering

Role overview A high-growth biotech organization is hiring a Head of Software Engineering to lead the team building software infrastructure for an automated laboratory where AI agents run biology experiments. This is a player-coach position: you will write code on the highest-leverage problems while owning the engineering roadmap, team structure, and technical direction. The work spans a complex software and hardware stack that includes instrument control, device orchestration, observability, data processing, and AI-driven troubleshooting of experimental results.

Responsibilities - Own the engineering roadmap, deciding what to build, defer, or kill, and translating company strategy into clear priorities - Set technical direction and architecture across frontend, backend, data pipelines, and lab-hardware integration - Ship production code on the most leverage-heavy problems rather than only reviewing others' work - Hire, grow, and set the bar for a small engineering team that ships quickly and holds quality high - Build AI-assisted development practices into a genuine speed advantage for the team - Ensure reliability across systems whose failures cause real experiments to fail and real customers to be affected

Requirements - Extensive experience shipping production software, with a strong desire to keep coding while leading - Prior experience hiring, managing, and developing engineers in a startup or high-growth environment - Demonstrated ownership of an engineering roadmap, including scope tradeoffs and pragmatic prioritization - Broad technical depth across frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure, with judgment on when to go deep or delegate - Daily use of AI agents and coding tools as a force multiplier, with a clear point of view on how they reshape teams and workflows - Genuine interest in biology and comfort working on a product that runs physical-world experiments

Benefits and work setup - Applications reviewed on a rolling basis - A rare opportunity to help advance AI-driven biology at a fast-growing biotech, trusted by leading biopharmas, frontier AI labs, and techbio companies