Role OverviewThe Associate Director drives the design, development, and operation of large-scale infrastructure that powers the Broad Institute's scientific discovery and sharing. This role blends agentic software engineering, data science, DevOps, and platform architecture, ensuring that scientific workflows run reliably, efficiently, and at massive scale where required. The Associate Director, Software Engineering works closely with computational scientists, operations teams, and external collaborators to transform research prototypes into production-grade systems.
Key Responsibilities- Direct technical design and implementation for new agentic capabilities, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
- Guide teams in collaborating with scientific and engineering teams to translate research requirements into robust production systems.
- Establish and enforce engineering best practices for agentic engineering and DevOps, observability, infrastructure automation, and cloud operations.
- Manage and mentor senior engineers while driving long-term platform strategy.
- Lead a high-performing team, directly managing 1-2 initial reports with the opportunity to scale the team as organizational funding permits
Required Qualifications- Agentic engineering fluency and proficiency with recent LLM ecosystems (e.g. claude, Codex, Copilot)
- BS with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time leading engineering teams in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles, or a Master's and 8+ years of related experience, or a PhD and 5+ years of related experience.
- 5+ years' management experience required.
- Demonstrated ability to oversee the design and delivery of high-scale, distributed systems in cloud environments (AWS or GCP).
- Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, containerization, and cloud-native operations.
- Experience with modern database systems (relational, document, graph, etc.)
- Ability to align and communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Proven track record of leading teams effectively in fast-paced, cross-disciplinary environments.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience leading initiatives that support scientific computing, bioinformatics workflows, or large-scale data processing pipelines.
- Experience overseeing the integration of heterogeneous systems across research, clinical, and operational domains.
- Prior work managing operations in mission-critical environments with strict reliability and throughput requirements.
The expected base pay range for this position as listed above is based on a 40 hour per week schedule. Broad provides pay ranges representing its reasonable and good faith estimate of what the organization reasonably expects to pay for a position at the time of posting. Actual compensation will vary based on factors including but not limited to, relevant skills, experience, education, qualifications, and other factors permissible by law.
At Broad, your base pay is just one part of a comprehensive total rewards package. From day one, this role offers a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; a 401(k) retirement plan; flexible spending and health savings accounts; at least 13 paid holidays; winter closure; paid time off; parental and family care leave; and an employee assistance program, among other Broad benefits.
