Director of Engineering, Builder Tools

Hadrian Automation • Los Angeles, CA

1d • $250,000 - $320,000

About The Position

Hadrian is building autonomous factories to revolutionize manufacturing in the aerospace and defense sectors, aiming for significantly faster and cheaper production of critical parts. The company is expanding rapidly with new facilities and business lines, backed by prominent investors. The Director of Engineering, Builder Tools role is crucial for enhancing engineering velocity by focusing on the quality of tools, workflows, and development practices. This position leads a team responsible for engineering productivity, internal tooling, and AI-enabled development workflows, with the primary goal of making Hadrian's engineers faster and more effective. The role involves close collaboration with infrastructure, security, and product teams to drive improvements across the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Requirements

• 8-12 years in software engineering, with 3-5+ years in engineering management
• Strong backend or platform engineering background with deep familiarity with modern SDLC systems
• Experience leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams
• Track record of delivering measurable improvements in engineering velocity or system reliability
• Ability to think in systems: understand the end-to-end development lifecycle and identify where to optimize
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar), observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus), and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience implementing AI-assisted development workflows
• Familiarity with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.)
• Experience with CI/CD optimization at scale
• Strong data-driven approach to measuring and improving developer productivity
• Ability to treat internal tooling as a product: clear users, defined impact, feedback loops
• Experience driving adoption of new tools and workflows across engineering organizations

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers focused on engineering productivity and internal developer tools
• Define and execute a roadmap to improve end-to-end SDLC efficiency and reliability (plan, build, test, deploy, observe)
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development tools across engineering, from code assistants to LLM-powered workflows
• Identify bottlenecks in developer workflows and implement scalable, lasting solutions
• Improve CI/CD systems, testing frameworks, and deployment processes
• Establish metrics to measure developer productivity and system performance
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and product teams to improve delivery pipelines
• Hire, mentor, and develop engineers and tech leads
• Ensure high standards for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across internal tooling

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans for employees
• 401k
• Relocation support may be provided for certain situations, based on business need.
• Flexible vacation policy
• Equity

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager