Director, Engineering

GenBio AI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 280,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

GenBio AI in Palo Alto is seeking a highly execution-oriented Director of Engineering to translate long-term research into production-grade systems. You will drive roadmaps, enforce timelines, and lead a growing team of engineers across product and infrastructure.

As a hands-on leader, you will write code, review PRs, mentor engineers, and shape an ambitious AI platform that scales generative models and MLOps pipelines.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with 5+ years in senior leadership roles.
• Hands-on engineering leader with ability to write code and review PRs.
• Experience scaling high-performing teams and shipping production-grade systems.

Responsibilities

• Translate vision into concrete engineering roadmaps and timelines.
• Contribute hands-on code, review PRs, and set technical standards.
• Bridge research and engineering to production, scalable architectures.
• Institute rigorous testing, CI/CD, and strong developer experience.
• Mentor and develop engineers, providing coaching and feedback.
• Align execution with executive and research leads to meet business goals.

Skills

Leadership

AI infrastructure

Production systems

GPU optimization

Cross-functional

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

GenBio AI is an AI for Science company on a mission to make biology fully computable. We are building AIDO (AI-Driven Digital Organism) to simulate living systems, decode biology holistically, and accelerate medical and scientific research. Our first step toward that mission is AIDO Cell, the first virtual cell world model that holistically simulates cell biology from molecules up to whole-cell behavior. It enables researchers to run experiments virtually, predicting how cells respond to genetic changes, drugs and other interventions before going into the lab. It is supported by AIDO Foundry, an AI-builds-AI engineering framework for automating virtual cell development, and AIDO Lab, an interface to digitally run experiments and observe the results. Together they form the foundation for a new paradigm in AI-driven drug discovery, bioengineering, and fundamental biomedical research.

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.

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

We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. GenBio AI participates in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify program to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. For more information on E-Verify, please visit www.e-verify.gov.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.