Director of Software Engineering AI-Driven Full-Stack Leader

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Discretionary annual bonus

No-cost health insurance plans

401(k) with company match

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Element Biosciences is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead a cross-disciplinary software org for multi-omic instruments and platforms. The role blends hands-on coding (60%) with team leadership (40%), spanning frontend, backend, cloud services, and instrument software.

You'll set technical direction, own delivery for product areas, and collaborate with product, chemistry, hardware, and adjacent software teams to translate complex workflows into scalable software, while maintaining

Qualifications

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

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.
• Manage team budget, capacity planning, and cross-team dependencies; partner with peer leaders across Informatics, AI, Product, Hardware, and Chemistry.
• Champion and roll out agentic SDLC practices -- Cursor, Claude, and AI-driven workflows -- across your team, into the broader software org, and help shape best practices for the larger company.

Skills

Go

React

AWS

MongoDB

Redis

gRPC

GraphQL

Temporal

Ubuntu

Education

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

Tools

Temporal

GraphQL

gRPC

MongoDB

Redis

Ubuntu

AWS

Go

React

Job description

Element Biosciences is seeking a Director of Software Engineering to lead a cross-disciplinary software org for multi-omic instruments and platforms. The role blends hands-on coding (60%) with team leadership (40%), spanning frontend, backend, cloud services, and instrument software.

You'll set technical direction, own delivery for product areas, and collaborate with product, chemistry, hardware, and adjacent software teams to translate complex workflows into scalable software, while maintaining