Director of Software Engineering

Radical AI•New York, NY

1d•$237,000 - $350,000•Onsite

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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)

Responsibilities

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
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
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
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