Director/Senior Director, Lab Platform Engineering (AI)

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA or San Francisco, CA, USA

Salary: $232,000–$390,000 USD base compensation, with bonus potential and early-stage equity.

Company

hirify.global is building AI-powered scientific systems and autonomous AI Science Factory instruments to accelerate discovery across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Build and lead a Lab Platform Engineering organization of 10–15 engineers, including managers and technical leads.
• Set multi-year strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure across distributed automated laboratory sites.
• Own the platform roadmap, delivery cadence, fleet operations, service levels, on-call, and incident response.
• Manage infrastructure budgets, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
• Partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security leaders on platform requirements and tradeoffs.
• Raise engineering standards through reviews, technical direction, and thought leadership.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience, including 8+ years leading teams with managers or technical leads, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team.
• Deep experience with hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud.
• Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, including ownership of on-call and incident practices.
• Experience owning infrastructure budgets, capacity planning, and vendor negotiations.
• Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders.
• Ability to hire and develop senior- and principal-level engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience with laboratory automation, robotics, hardware-adjacent platforms, or lab software for life sciences or materials science.
• Experience with multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, or over-the-air software rollouts.
• Experience with identity and secrets management across hybrid environments and regulated or audited settings.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, or AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team.
• Experience standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, or managing teams distributed across offices and remote locations.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, employer-paid life and disability insurance, paid parental leave, and flexible time off with company-wide holidays.
• Benefits include educational assistance, commuter benefits including bike-share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive regionally tailored benefits; international salaries are set to local market.
• The company operates with startup speed and values truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity.

Hiring process

• Applications are accepted from candidates; unsolicited agency resumes are not accepted unless the agency is contacted directly by hirify.global’ internal Talent Acquisition team.