Director of Engineering, Builder Tools

Engineering velocity is a strategic advantage at Hadrian. As we scale our software organization, the quality of our tools, workflows, and development practices directly determines how fast we can move. The Builder Tools team owns that surface area, working across the entire SDLC to reduce friction, accelerate delivery, and bring AI-assisted development practices to every engineering team.

As Director of Engineering, Builder Tools, you will lead a team of 6-10 engineers focused on engineering productivity, internal tooling, and AI-enabled development workflows. Your users are Hadrian’s engineers, and your mission is to make them faster and more effective. You will report to the VP of Engineering and partner closely with infrastructure, security, and product teams to drive improvements across CI/CD, testing, deployment, and observability.

This is a high-leverage role. The work you ship here touches every engineer at Hadrian.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and grow a team of engineers focused on engineering productivity and internal developer tools
• Define and execute a roadmap to improve end-to-end SDLC efficiency and reliability (plan, build, test, deploy, observe)
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development tools across engineering, from code assistants to LLM-powered workflows
• Identify bottlenecks in developer workflows and implement scalable, lasting solutions
• Improve CI/CD systems, testing frameworks, and deployment processes
• Establish metrics to measure developer productivity and system performance
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and product teams to improve delivery pipelines
• Hire, mentor, and develop engineers and tech leads
• Ensure high standards for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across internal tooling, This role is a high-leverage position with significant room to grow. As Hadrian’s engineering organization scales, the scope of this function expands with it. The natural trajectory leads toward a Manager-of-Managers role (M5) with broader ownership of the engineering productivity org and potential leadership of Hadrian’s AI strategy for engineering.

• 8-12 years in software engineering, with 3-5+ years in engineering management
• Strong backend or platform engineering background with deep familiarity with modern SDLC systems
• Experience leading and scaling high-performing engineering teams
• Track record of delivering measurable improvements in engineering velocity or system reliability
• Ability to think in systems: understand the end-to-end development lifecycle and identify where to optimize
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar), observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus), and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes)
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience

What Will Set You Apart

• Hands-on experience implementing AI-assisted development workflows
• Familiarity with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.)
• Experience with CI/CD optimization at scale
• Strong data-driven approach to measuring and improving developer productivity
• Ability to treat internal tooling as a product: clear users, defined impact, feedback loops
• Experience driving adoption of new tools and workflows across engineering organizations

Pulled from the full job description

• 401(k)
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance
• Life insurance, For this role, the target salary range is $250,000 - $320,000 (actual range may vary based on experience).

This is the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the range may be modified in the future. An employee’s pay position within the salary range will be based on several factors, including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Benefits for Full-time Employees

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans for employees
• 401k
• Relocation support may be provided for certain situations, based on business need.
• Flexible vacation policy
• Equity

Hadrian is building autonomous factories that help aerospace and defense companies manufacture rockets, satellites, jets, and ships up to 10x faster and up to 2x cheaper. By combining advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we are reinventing how America produces its most critical parts.

We’re accelerating our mission with the launch of Factory 3 in Mesa, Arizona, a 290,000-square-foot facility creating 350 new jobs. We are expanding rapidly to support thousands of future hires, launching Hadrian Maritime to expand into naval production, and introducing a Factory-as-a-Service model that delivers complete systems instead of individual parts.

Hadrian is backed by leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, our fast-growing team is united around reindustrializing American manufacturing for the 21st century and beyond.