Director, Software Engineering

About The Role

Feanix is expanding its product offerings based on our farmers' needs and moving into other species, and engineering has to scale with these business goals. Today we're a small, tight engineering team behind one core product: Autopilot and sire mating, the decision engine farmers act on every day. We're shifting from individuals carrying whole systems to teams that share them, and we're growing in close partnership with our product organization. Over the next 12–18 months we plan to grow engineering to around 30 people. The technology organization includes software, hardware, and product, and this role leads software development.

You'll be our first Director of Engineering, reporting to the CTO. You'll lead a team of engineering managers: two have already joined, and you'll hire more to support the organization's growth. Our staff and principal engineers, who lead architecture, also report directly to you rather than to the EMs. You run the engineering org and its delivery, and you set technical direction together with them.

You'll report to a repeat CTO who wants thought partners: people who lay out the options, show their reasoning, and ask what we'd do if the current options disappeared. You'll also be one of a small group of technical leaders setting direction for the company. We're growing fast and working with biological systems, so designing with an experimental mindset is crucial.. You should be comfortable with ambiguity and making good calls with incomplete information.

The impact of this role is through your people. Your output is a team that ships: clear roles, managers who can build and run teams of 6–8 engineers, and cohesive system and team design. We expect you to be technically credible and fluent in how software is now built, but you won't be writing production code or doing line-by-line review.

Your Partnership With Product and Hardware

You'll join the growing director team in our technology organization, alongside our Director of Product and Director of Hardware. Together you'll deliver products with one goal: making farms as profitable and efficient as possible. We do that through the best possible breeding decisions for cattle, sensors that collect phenotypic data, and analysis built on the genomic data we collect and process.

As a team, you're accountable for keeping our existing products stable and growing their value, while prototyping, testing, and rolling out new ones.

What You'll Do

• Lead and support the engineering managers. Our EMs are experienced managers, and your job is to make them more effective. Give them the context, support, and clear expectations they need to build high-functioning teams with real accountability for outcomes. Unblock them across teams, back their hard calls, and hold them to a consistent bar. Hire the managers we'll need as we grow.
• Design the org as it grows. In partnership with the CTO and your fellow directors, grow the engineering organization. Gather signals and input from engineers, EMs, and the teams closest to farmers, and use them to turn high-level plans into a concrete org and roadmap that meet customer needs. Decide when and how teams split, and draw boundaries around the architecture rather than around labels. Our working areas are platform and decision engine, farm delivery (data on and off farm computers, automation, QC), modeling and genomics, and new planned product lines.
• Build how we hire and onboard. With the CTO and our recruiting team, create and refine an engineering hiring process that attracts high-quality talent and keeps the bar high as we grow. Make sure new engineers onboard quickly, and that people are in the right seats as teams form and change.
• Make delivery predictable. With the Director of Product, turn strategy into committed outcomes for each team. Surface tradeoffs early, and report progress in terms of what reached farms, not activity.
• Protect platform investment. Make sure the infrastructure that unlocks future products is designed, staffed, and built alongside customer work. Make platform and architecture calls together with the CTO and your architecture leaders.
• Lead an AI-native engineering org. Our engineers work spec-first and direct coding agents. Set the standards (specs, evals, testing, CI, and security) that let people and agents ship safely without heavy process. Decide where agents should carry the load, such as support and bug fixing, and where people need to. When agent output goes wrong, fix the spec or harness, not just the symptom, and keep evolving these practices as the tools change.
• Build the operating system. Put in place the lightweight rhythm a fast team actually uses: escalation paths, incident response, release discipline, and knowing who's responsible for what.
• Shape how we plan and grow people. With the CTO and your fellow directors, help build the leveling framework for technical roles, our planning cycles, and our performance review system, so expectations are clear and growth paths are fair for both managers and ICs.
• Partner across Feanix. Work with Farm Success, Farm Ops, and our science teams so what we ship holds up on real farms. Join farm visits and stay close to the customer.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: You understand your peers across the organization and how engineering works with each of them. You've started setting expectations with your direct reports. You've reviewed our technical hiring process and made improvements where it needs them. You've spent time on a farm and know the system and the customer.
• First 90 days: Technical hiring is operationalized: you've built on the process we already have, not redesigned it, and it runs reliably with the EMs and recruiting. You and the Director of Product have aligned on the roadmap, and you're confident it's achievable with the team we have and the team we're hiring; where it isn't, the tradeoffs are on the table. You've established a working partnership with the Director of Hardware and agreed on how hardware and software teams will plan and hand off work. Your EMs know what you expect of them, and each team has clear goals and a delivery cadence you can report on.
• First 6 months: At least one new product has launched to farms, our hardware pilots have the software they need, and the core product has stayed stable as we've grown.
• First 12 months: Engineering has supported the company's sales and impact goals for the year: farms are onboarded as fast as we sign them, new products reach farms on schedule, and the organization is ready to take on what comes next.

What You Bring

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers and at least 2 years managing managers. You reached a senior engineering level as an IC first.
• A track record of scaling an engineering org at a startup through a growth phase, ideally from around 10 to 30+ engineers, including splitting teams and adding a management layer as you went.
• Managers you can point to: people you hired or promoted into management and developed into strong leaders.
• Experience building engineering hiring processes that attract strong talent, including calibrating interviewers and closing senior candidates.
• Experience leading delivery across several products or teams at once, and balancing customer-facing roadmap work against platform and infrastructure investment.
• Deep fluency with AI-native engineering. You've moved teams to spec-first, agentic development, and you have real opinions on specs, evals, verification, and quality in that world. You use AI daily in your own leadership work.
• A strong partnership record with product leaders: you've worked as an equal partner to a head of product, not as an order-taker or a gatekeeper.
• Experience partnering with hardware or science leaders to deliver products that span physical devices, data, and software.
• Clear written communication and the judgment to report status, risk, and tradeoffs at the right level for the CTO, CEO, and board.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading teams that ship ML, data-intensive, or decision-support products
• Experience with platform re-architecture while the business kept shipping: data models, pipelines, or event-driven systems
• Experience with products that combine software with hardware, sensors, or edge compute
• Experience in a remote-first engineering org
• Interest in agriculture, biology, genomics, or working close to a physical industry

Ultimately, we care far more about demonstrated ability, curiosity, and problem-solving than pedigree or conventional career paths.

Logistics

• Remote (US), ideally able to work west coast hours
• Travel about 20% of the time: recruiting, time with teams and at our headquarters, and customer farm visits

Why You'll Enjoy Working With Us

• The People - we have an amazing group of talented, smart and fun people on our team!
• The Company - we are building something novel that has not been done before which is making a huge impact on the dairy industry!
• The Experience - you get to come in and be a part of ground breaking work that will have a huge impact on generations to come!