Technical Director - Chemical Informatics Software

BioSpace; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

BioSpace in San Diego is seeking a Technical Director to own the engineering landscape, set architecture strategy, and mentor a growing team. This hands-on role combines debugging, builds, and deployments with long-term planning as we modernize Oracle/.NET into PostgreSQL, Node.js/Fastify, React, and Linux across our SaaS and on-prem offerings.

You will lead a migration to open-source cheminformatics, manage AWS infrastructure end-to-end, and represent the company in enterprise customer

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering leadership or architecture.
• Hands-on execution and troubleshooting in production environments.
• Experience migrating legacy systems to open-source stacks.
• Proficiency with Node.js/TypeScript, Fastify, React, PostgreSQL, and Linux.
• Experience configuring nginx as reverse proxy and deploying Node services with PM2.
• Experience with AWS infra: VPC, compute, database provisioning, security groups, backups.
• Familiarity with LDAP/AD, SAML SSO, and API gateways.
• Zero-trust or identity-based access concepts desired.
• Strong stakeholder management and vendor interactions.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap for migrating applications from Oracle/IIS/.NET to PostgreSQL, Node.js/Fastify, React, and Linux.
• Direct engineering team’s day-to-day development work, prioritizing tasks and reviewing output.
• Grow engineering capability and reduce single-point-of-failure risk across legacy and open-source stacks.
• Lead Cheminformatics technology strategy and migration to open-source platforms such as RDKit.
• Coordinate customer and vendor technical engagement with enterprise IT teams.
• Establish security and documentation governance, including credential management and reproducible engineering docs.
• Steward legacy systems to ensure stability while moving toward modern open-source architecture.

Skills

Architecture

Hands-on coding

AWS

Node.js

React

PostgreSQL

Linux

Security

Stakeholder mgmt

NGINX/PM2

Tools

RDKit

Chemaxon/JChem

Docker

Kubernetes

MuleSoft

Okta

Job description

About Our Company

We are a life-sciences software company, founded in 2000, that builds and supports chemical inventory, laboratory safety, and R&D-workflow applications for global pharmaceutical and biotech customers. Our flagship platforms and companion products work together to give bench scientists and lab operations teams fast, compliant access to chemical inventory. Adjacent products that manage synthesis outsourcing workflow and instrument tracking extend our footprint deeper into pharma R&D operations.

We are in the middle of modernizing our technology: moving from Oracle, IIS, and .NET Framework/WebForms and onto PostgreSQL, Node.js (Fastify), React, React Native, and Linux (RHEL) — while continuing to support mission-critical legacy installations our customers depend on today. All of our development, production, and customer-hosted environments run in our own AWS virtual private cloud, including a single-tenant hosted (SaaS) offering for customers who access our products remotely rather than on-premises, some using their own Okta identity provider for single sign-on. Our applications' chemistry capabilities currently run on the Chemaxon (now Certara) JChem cartridge and Marvin/ChemDraw editors; we are actively working to both migrate to Chemaxon's newer Choral platform and open up a path to open-source cheminformatics (such as RDKit) and open-source molecular editors.

The Role

The Technical Director will directly manage our engineering team's day-to-day development work — deciding what gets built and how, reviewing and guiding the team's technical output, and ensuring engineering effort stays aligned with architecture strategy and business priority.

Presently, our founders and a small group of senior engineers share responsibility for architecture decisions, vendor and licensing management, and senior technical relationships with our largest customers — alongside a small team that is simultaneously maintaining a large, mission-critical legacy Oracle/.NET estate and building out our open-source stack. We are looking for a Technical Director to take direct, consolidated ownership of the entire technical landscape: setting and executing architecture strategy, leading our stack modernization and cheminformatics transition, growing and mentoring the engineering team, and representing the company credibly in technical conversations with large enterprise customers and their IT organizations.

Titles can be a little misleading at a company our size: this is a deeply hands‑on, technical role. Initially, you will personally perform a myriad of technical work — troubleshooting production issues, running builds, and executing deployments — while building genuine expertise across as much of our technical landscape as possible, quickly coming up to speed in areas outside your current experience, and working alongside the team with genuine enthusiasm. As the team and company grow, this role will naturally evolve toward a more traditional director-level scope, but the immediate need is for a hands‑on technical owner.

This role reports directly to the founders and will be the senior-most technical authority in the company. You will inherit a real, partially-executed modernization strategy — including a working reference architecture (a Fastify/PostgreSQL/React/RHEL pattern already proven on an existing product) — and a mandate to extend it deliberately across the rest of the portfolio rather than one-off improvisation.

This role is empowered to bring in, where needed, specialized contractor support — whether in-house or external — for specific, highly technical needs you are not yet able to handle independently. You are not expected to initially be the expert in everything, but any outside expertise you engage must be closely managed, with the resulting procedures and protocols thoroughly documented and internalized by the team. The goal is always to add lasting value to the company’s internal expertise and remove ongoing dependency on external resources.

Ownership

Architecture & modernization strategy

• Own the technical roadmap for migrating our applications from Oracle, IIS, and .NET Framework onto PostgreSQL, Node.js/Fastify, React, React Native, and Linux (RHEL) — extending the pattern already established on one application to our flagship product lines.
• Decide, case by case, when a product should be rebuilt vs. incrementally modernized vs. maintained as‑is, and make that case to the founders and, where relevant, to customers.
• Establish and enforce formalized technical leadership and engineering standards (code review, testing, deployment, documentation) across the team.

Team leadership

• Directly manage and direct the engineering team’s day‑to‑day development work — assigning and prioritizing technical tasks, reviewing code and technical output, and unblocking technical problems as they arise.
• Grow engineering capability and reduce single‑point‑of‑failure risk. Mentor and manage a distributed team spanning legacy .NET/Oracle maintenance and open‑source full‑stack platform development; hire as the team grows.
• Work closely with the Senior Project Manager to translate technical priorities into a tracked delivery plan, providing the technical judgment needed for realistic sequencing and timeline commitments.
• Engage specialty contractors or consultants — in‑house or external — for specific, highly technical needs, and ensure the resulting procedures and protocols are internalized and documented by the core team.

Cloud infrastructure management

• Own our AWS‑hosted infrastructure end to end — virtual private cloud and network design, compute and database provisioning, security groups, backup and disaster‑recovery policy, and cost management — across development, production, and customer‑hosted environments.
• Manage our single‑tenant, hosted (SaaS) deployment model for customers who access our products remotely rather than on‑premises, including provisioning, certificate and DNS lifecycle management, identity‑provider (e.g., Okta SAML) integration, and uptime/availability commitments.
• Modernize infrastructure operations that are currently manual and concentrated in a single administrator — moving toward infrastructure‑as‑code, automated certificate and secrets management, and clearer environment isolation and access control.

Cheminformatics technology strategy

• Lead migration from Chemaxon’s legacy JChem Oracle cartridge and MarvinJS editor to the newer Choral cartridge and next‑generation Marvin — including any associated backend rendering‑logic, not just the front‑end editor updates.
• Design and deliver a supported open‑source cheminformatics alternative built on chosen and identified open‑source platforms, for example, RDKit, and extend our applications’ existing pluggable structure‑editor architecture to a fully open‑source alternative for customers.
• Coordinate Chemaxon/Certara vendor management as needed, with the goal of owning the technical and commercial aspects of this relationship.

Customer & vendor technical engagement

• Serve as the company’s senior technical point of contact for enterprise customers’ IT and security organizations — including navigating large‑company processes like ServiceNow, Jira, and API‑gateway governance (e.g., integrating with customer procurement platforms via exposed APIs or managed gateways such as MuleSoft) — where progress often depends more on stakeholder navigation than raw engineering effort.
• Represent the company in technical evaluations with prospective new teams inside existing accounts (e.g., an active evaluation by a customer’s European R&D group considering one of our products as a replacement for an in‑house procurement/inventory system).

Security & documentation governance

• Establish credential‑management and secrets‑handling practices across the company’s technical estate, and drive remediation of any outstanding cloud security findings (e.g., unresolved monitoring alerts, overly broad network access).
• Bring rigorous, reproducible engineering and architecture documentation practices — our enterprise customers require vendor continuity and documentation sufficiency for a successor team, and this should be treated as a competitive and contractual asset, not overhead.

Legacy system stewardship

• Ensure our large legacy Oracle/.NET Framework/WebForms codebases remain stable, secure, and supportable for customers who are not yet ready to move to the new open‑source stack.

Required

What We Are Looking For

• Significant professional software engineering experience — 10+ years is typical, but exceptional candidates with less experience who demonstrate strong architecture and technical leadership ability are encouraged to apply — including experience in a technical leadership, architecture, or engineering‑management role.
• Genuine enthusiasm for hands‑on execution — writing code, troubleshooting production issues, running builds, and executing deployments — not just directing others. At our current size, this is much of the job day to day; the role is expected to evolve toward a more traditional director scope as the team grows.
• Direct, hands‑on experience leading a legacy‑to‑open‑source technology migration — ideally something structurally similar to ours: Oracle → PostgreSQL, .NET Framework → Node.js/React, and/or Windows/IIS → Linux.
• Working proficiency with our target stack: Node.js/TypeScript, an open‑source web framework (Fastify or similar), React, PostgreSQL, and Linux server administration (RHEL or another enterprise Linux distribution).
• Experience configuring nginx (or equivalent) as a reverse proxy for Node.js APIs, and running Node services in production with a process manager such as pm2 (cluster mode, log management, zero‑downtime deploys).
• Hands‑on experience managing AWS (or comparable cloud provider) infrastructure — VPC and network design, compute and database provisioning, security groups, backup/DR, and cost management — including experience modernizing manually‑provisioned environments toward infrastructure‑as‑code and automated certificate/secrets management.
• Experience with enterprise authentication and identity patterns — LDAP/Active Directory integration, SAML‑based SSO (e.g., Okta) — and, ideally, integrating with large‑enterprise API platforms (API gateways such as MuleSoft, or comparable).
• Familiarity with zero‑trust or identity‑based access architectures (e.g., Cloudflare Access, Citrix Secure Private Access, or comparable) as an alternative to traditional VPN access — an active area of technical investigation for us today.
• A track record of introducing and maintaining engineering discipline — documentation, code review, secure credential handling.
• Strong stakeholder‑management instincts: comfortable being the technical face of a small vendor inside a large enterprise customer’s IT organization, including working through formal ticketing/security‑review processes.

Strongly Preferred — Cheminformatics / Chemistry Domain Background

• Direct experience with cheminformatics toolkits or platforms — RDKit, ChemAxon/JChem/Marvin, Open Babel, or similar — including molecular structure representation (SMILES, MolBlock/SDF) and structure/substructure search.
• A background in chemistry, chemical engineering, or a related scientific discipline, or substantial hands‑on experience building software for pharmaceutical/biotech R&D, laboratory operations, or EH&S compliance.

For exceptional candidates without a chemistry background

We will consider candidates without direct cheminformatics or chemistry experience if they bring exceptionally strong architecture and technical leadership credentials, a genuine, demonstrable interest in scientific and laboratory software, and a clear willingness to build deep domain expertise on the job. This is a real trade‑off we are open to making for the right person.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with legacy ASP.NET WebForms / IIS / .NET Framework environments, useful for the legacy‑stewardship portion of this role.
• React Native or other mobile app development experience. AWS certification (e.g., Solutions Architect) or equivalent demonstrated cloud infrastructure expertise.
• Comfort working with vendor hardware SDKs and support escalations (e.g., barcode/RFID scanners, label printers) — relevant to our mobile inventory‑scanning products, though not a specialized requirement.
• Experience with Apple’s enterprise app‑distribution stack (Apple Developer Enterprise/Business Manager, Volume Purchase Program, code signing) and mobile device management platforms (Microsoft Intune or comparable) — we actively manage several iOS applications through a large enterprise customer’s MDM environment.
• Experience serving regulated life‑sciences or other compliance‑heavy enterprise customers (e.g., EH&S, DEA‑controlled‑substance handling, GxP‑adjacent environments).
• Prior experience at a small (sub‑20‑person) software company, comfortable wearing multiple hats and operating with limited dedicated support functions.