Director, Software Engineering

About the role

At Element Biosciences, we are passionate about our mission to empower the scientific community with more freedom and flexibility to accelerate our collective impact on humanity. We have built a highly efficient product-driven organization where employees can learn, grow, and thrive in a challenging but encouraging environment. We are committed to scientific integrity, collegiality, honesty, objectivity, and openness.

We're hiring a Director of Software Engineering to lead a team of developers building the software that powers our multi-omic instruments and platforms. Your team's surface area spans frontend, backend, cloud services, instrument software, CLI/API, and agentic tooling -- across customer-facing products and internal tools that keep the rest of the organization moving fast. This is a hands-on Director role. You'll spend roughly 60% of your time as an IC -- writing production-grade code, driving architecture, and running design reviews -- and 40% managing, mentoring, and growing your team. You'll set direction across the full stack, own delivery for your team's products, and act as the connective tissue between product, chemistry, hardware, and adjacent software teams. Our software supports both research and regulated markets, so you'll need to move fast where you can and hold the line on design controls and V&V where it matters.

We're an AI-forward org. Our engineers use Cursor, Claude, and other AI tooling daily, and we're actively rolling out agentic SDLC workflows across the software function. You'll be expected to champion and shape that adoption for your team. You are a senior technical leader who has shipped production-grade software across the full stack, is comfortable getting hands-on in any layer, and has a track record of building and growing high-performing engineering teams. You bring grit, a bias for action, and a can-do attitude when things get hard. This role will report to our VP, Software and will be a daily onsite role in San Diego, CA.

If you possess the following and want to make a meaningful impact, we invite you to explore this role.

Essential Functions and 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

- Contribute to overall software processes, practices, training, and quality/security assurances for the software department