Head of Software Engineering (AI)

Location: On-site at the Brooklyn Navy Yard headquarters in New York City; regular in-person presence is required. Candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to New York City. Remote and fractional arrangements are not available.

Salary: $237,000–$340,000 base per year, plus equity and benefits.

Company

Develops new materials for demanding performance goals using scientific agents, automated laboratory synthesis, characterization, and validation.

What you will do

• Build, lead, hire, develop, and retain a high-caliber software engineering team.
• Ship production code weekly, conduct daily code reviews, and participate in architectural decisions.
• Own the long-term software development roadmap with company leadership and product stakeholders.
• Translate ambiguous scientific and business requirements into clear technical strategy.
• Collaborate with science, hardware, product, and customer-facing stakeholders on high-stakes deployments.
• Establish effective engineering processes, planning rhythms, retrospectives, and code review practices.

Requirements

• 8–15 years of software engineering experience with current hands-on production work.
• Experience building or scaling an engineering team from fewer than 15 people in a startup or similarly fast-moving environment within the last five years.
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to design complex distributed systems under constraints.
• Fluency in Go and/or Python.
• Demonstrated ability to establish processes that improve team speed without unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to New York City and work in person regularly.

Nice to have

• Experience with hybrid cloud/on-premises deployments or customer-site delivery combining hardware and software.
• Background in robotics, automation, scientific computing, or constrained production environments.
• Familiarity with agentic systems, LLM workflows, or AI-adjacent infrastructure.
• Experience with containerization, Kubernetes, AWS, and infrastructure as code using Terraform or CloudFormation.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, senior team operating in a fast-moving and ambiguous environment.
• Hands-on player-coach role with a focus on shipping quickly and making decisions with incomplete information.
• 100% employer-covered medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Unlimited paid time off, 14 or more company holidays, 401(k), and mental health support.
• Base compensation includes equity and varies according to experience and scope.