Head of Software Engineering

Radical AI is a materials company replacing the R&D process that currently takes 10 years and $100 million to produce a single discovery. Instead of leaving world-changing industries like aerospace, automotive, energy, manufacturing, semiconductors, and space to engineer around material shortcomings, Radical invents new materials for specific performance goals in a matter of weeks. This acceleration of research is fueled by scientific agents that simulate novel compositions and then send them directly into an automated lab for physical synthesis, characterization, and validation.

We're a small, senior team, growing fast. This is a foundational hire.

We're looking for a Head of Software Engineering to build and lead the software engineering team as we scale. This is a player-coach role in the truest sense: you ship code every week, and you own the team's growth, culture, processes, and long-term technical direction. You ship fast, iterate in public, and don't wait for consensus.

You'll report to our President and Co-Founder, and work closely with cross-functional stakeholders across science, hardware, and product. The immediate mandate is to stabilize and grow a talented but lean team during a period of rapid hiring and technical expansion — including near-term customer deployments that involve significant architectural challenges.

This is not a role for someone who wants to delegate the hard technical problems. It's for someone who wants to be in the middle of them, and who's comfortable making calls with incomplete information.

Hire, develop, and retain a high-caliber software engineering team

Establish the rhythms that make the team hum: standups, planning, retrospectives, code review culture

Be the person your engineers grow with — technically and professionally

Conduct daily code reviews; ship production code weekly, with a bias toward shipping over perfecting

Drive and participate meaningfully in architectural discussions and decisions

Maintain deep enough fluency with the stack to debug production issues, challenge proposals, and earn your engineers' respect

Build and own the long-term software development roadmap, in close partnership with our co-founder and the product team

Translate ambiguous business and scientific requirements into clear technical strategy

Navigate the tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and scale in a high-stakes, rapidly evolving environment — and default to speed when the tradeoff is close

Be a credible technical voice in leadership discussions — someone who can whiteboard a system design as easily as they can present a roadmap

Interface with product, science, and hardware stakeholders effectively; understand what "customer-centric" actually means in a deep-tech context

8-15 years of software engineering experience, with current hands-on shipping (not just review and sign-off)

Has built or scaled an engineering team from under 15 people in a startup or similarly fast-moving environment within the last 5 years

Still deeply hands-on: you write code, review code, and won't use a management title as a reason not to

Strong systems thinking — you can design complex distributed systems under constraints and communicate tradeoffs clearly

Fluency in Go and/or Python (our primary stack)

Proven ability to establish processes that make teams faster without creating bureaucracy

Based in — or willing to relocate to — New York City; this role requires regular in-person presence with the team

You're coming from a large, process-mature engineering org without recent experience shipping in a fast, ambiguous, resource-constrained environment

You default to extensive review cycles or consensus-building before moving — this team makes real-time tradeoffs without established playbooks

This is an in-person role based at our Brooklyn Navy Yard headquarters.. We're not looking for a remote or fractional arrangement — the team needs someone on the ground.