Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering

On-site - South Bay Los Angeles

Base $225k - $300k + Equity

FutureTech Recruitment is partnered with a $11.5M funded seed-stage industrial AI startup building software that automates quoting, sourcing, and supply chain operations for aerospace and defense manufacturers. Founded in 2025, 12 people, operations across Metro Detroit and LA. Hardware is already moving - now they're building the software org from scratch.

Hiring a Director of Engineering to own technical strategy and build the engineering team from the ground up - spanning customer-facing software, internal ops, data, infrastructure, and applied ML. 70% hands-on engineering, 30% team leadership. You'll work directly with the founders, factory floor, sales, and ops to turn real manufacturing workflows into durable software.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical strategy and engineering roadmap across customer software, internal operations, data, infrastructure, and applied ML
• Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing engineering team from the ground up
• Design durable architecture across customer, commercial, and manufacturing systems - staying close enough to code to review critical designs
• Work directly with sales, operations, finance, and the factory floor to turn real workflows into software
• Raise the bar on reliability, security, and observability - measuring impact on customers and factory throughput
• Travel up to 20% to customers and vendors across LA, SF, and Detroit

Requirements

• Proven 0-to-1 ownership building and scaling systems at a high-growth tech startup
• 4-10 years of experience as a software engineer, with 1+ year leading an engineering team of 3-5
• Product-focused full-stack SWE (backend-leaning) - comfortable with 70% hands-on engineering and 30% team management
• Daily, deep use of frontier AI tools (e.g. Claude, Cursor) in workflow
• Comfortable working with both engineers and factory/operations teams
• Able to work on-site 5x/week in South Bay Los

Nice to Have

• Experience in manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, industrial software, or physical systems
• Experience with optimisation, data products, or production machine learning

$11.5M funded, 2025 vintage, real physical traction. If you want to build the software org from scratch at a company where your systems directly decide how fast American aerospace and defense manufacturers get their materials - we'd love to hear from you.