Director, Engineering

GenBio AI

$300K — $400K *
Pharmaceuticals & Biotech
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of extensive engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles.
  • Proven ability to manage managers and scale high-performing teams while maintaining hands-on technical skills.
  • Exceptional technical expertise in AI infrastructure and experience with generative AI products.
  • Ability to transition complex technologies from R&D to reliable enterprise platforms swiftly.
  • Deep knowledge of high-performance computing and distributed systems for scalable model training.

Responsibilities

  • Translate long-term vision into actionable engineering roadmaps and ensure timely delivery of milestones.
  • Act as a hands-on engineering leader; contribute to code, review pull requests, and coordinate efforts across teams.
  • Build connections between research and engineering to implement experimental models into production.
  • Establish and enforce high standards for code quality and testing practices to enhance developer experience.
  • Mentor and manage engineers, providing guidance and feedback to improve their performance and growth.
  • Collaborate with executive leadership to identify project dependencies and align technical execution with goals.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to redefine the future of biology and medicine in a cutting-edge role.
  • Work in a fast-paced, innovative environment with a dynamic team.
  • Be a key player in transitioning research into impactful commercial products.
Full Job Description
As our team scales, we are seeking a highly execution-oriented Director of Engineering to drive a culture of engineering excellence and rapid delivery at our Palo Alto office. The core objective of this role is to translate our long-term vision into actionable engineering roadmaps, enforce rigorous timelines, and successfully operationalize our research into production-grade systems.

Responsibilities

  • Translate high-level vision into concrete, actionable engineering roadmaps, driving a high-tempo shipping cadence and ensuring the team consistently hits critical product and infrastructure milestones on strict timelines.
  • Actively contribute to the codebase as a hands-on engineering leader, writing code, reviewing pull requests, and setting the technical bar while coordinating complex efforts across diverse product and infrastructure teams.
  • Build the critical operational bridge between research and engineering, architecting solutions to transition cutting-edge, experimental foundation models into robust, scalable, and highly available production systems.
  • Instill a relentless culture of rigor, velocity, and code quality by defining and enforcing uncompromising standards for automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and optimal developer experience.
  • Actively manage, mentor, and level up both junior and senior engineers, providing hands-on coaching, performance feedback loops, and architectural guidance to maximize their growth and technical output.
  • Partner closely with the executive leadership team and AI research leads to proactively identify critical path dependencies, clear blockers, and align technical execution with the company's ambitious scientific and commercial goals.


Qualifications

  • Extensive engineering experience (10+ years), with at least 5 years in senior leadership roles, demonstrating a proven track record of managing managers, scaling high-performing teams, and maintaining hands-on technical proficiency.
  • Exceptional technical expertise in modern AI infrastructure, with deep, hands-on experience building, scaling, and deploying complex generative AI products and massive foundation models into production environments.
  • Demonstrated execution-oriented mindset with the ability to swiftly transition complex, ambiguous technologies from a conceptual R&D phase into a highly reliable, commercial-grade enterprise platform.
  • Deep architectural understanding of high-performance computing, strategic GPU cluster optimization, and the unique distributed systems challenges involved in training and serving foundation models at scale.
  • Outstanding cross-functional orchestration skills, with the ability to manage complex project timelines and keep diverse, fast-moving teams focused on critical deliverables.


Preferred Qualifications

  • Domain knowledge or prior experience working within computational biology, genomics, drug discovery, or integrating AI into scientific software platforms.
  • Familiarity with building robust internal developer platforms, complex MLOps pipelines, or unified frameworks (similar to our AIDO Foundry) to accelerate AI deployment.
  • Prior experience at an early-stage, hyper-growth AI startup, demonstrating the ability to thrive in a highly ambiguous and fast-paced environment.


$300,000 - $400,000 a year

Join us as we embark on this journey to redefine the future of biology and medicine.

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at GenBio AI

More Pharmaceuticals & Biotech Jobs

Find similar Director, Engineering jobs: