Director, Hands-on Software Engineering & AI Platform

Element Biosciences Inc; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Discretionary annual bonus

Health insurance

401k with company match

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Element Biosciences is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead a versatile team building software for multi-omic instruments and platforms. This hands-on role spends ~60% of time coding and architecture, and ~40% mentoring and growing the team, spanning frontend, backend, cloud, and instrument software.

You’ll own delivery across product areas, align with product, chemistry, hardware and other software teams, and champion agentic SDLC with Cursor/Claude to accelerate development while

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Bioengineering, or related field (advanced degree preferred).
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years directly managing engineering teams.
• Track record shipping production‑grade software across the full stack -- frontend, backend, cloud services, and workflow orchestration.
• Hands‑on fluency with our stack or close equivalents: Go, React, MongoDB, Redis, gRPC, GraphQL, Temporal, Ubuntu, AWS.
• Daily fluency with AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude, or similar) and demonstrated experience introducing or scaling agentic SDLC workflows within a team.
• Experience shipping software that spans instrumentation, cloud SaaS, and CLI/API tooling.
• Strong analytical, communication, and cross‑functional collaboration skills; comfortable presenting to executives, customers, and technical stakeholders.
• Ability to thrive in a fast‑paced, dynamic environment while balancing IC contribution and team leadership.
• Experience with life sciences, multi‑omic, DNA sequencing, or scientific instrumentation software.
• Experience with regulated software workflows -- IEC 62304, ISO 13485, IVDR, or FDA 21 CFR Part 820.
• Experience shipping ML/AI features -- traditional ML pipelines and/or LLM/agent‑based features (RAG, tool use, evals).

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of software developers spanning frontend, backend, cloud, and instrument software.
• Set technical direction, define priorities, and align team execution with company goals and product roadmaps.
• Own hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews, career development, and resourcing decisions for the team.
• Foster a culture of ownership, quality, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Champion and roll out agentic SDLC practices -- Cursor, Claude, and AI‑driven workflows.
• Drive architecture and design for customer‑facing products and internal tooling; ensure production‑grade code and observability.

Skills

Go

React

GraphQL

AWS

Temporal

MongoDB

Redis

Ubuntu

Cursor

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Bioengineering, or related field

Tools

gRPC

Temporal

Ubuntu

AWS

Job description

Element Biosciences is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead a versatile team building software for multi-omic instruments and platforms. This hands-on role spends ~60% of time coding and architecture, and ~40% mentoring and growing the team, spanning frontend, backend, cloud, and instrument software.

You’ll own delivery across product areas, align with product, chemistry, hardware and other software teams, and champion agentic SDLC with Cursor/Claude to accelerate development while