Director, Software Engineering at Feanix Biotechnologies

Job description

About Feanix Bio Feanix is rebuilding animal breeding from the genome up. We’re a YC-backed startup using whole-genome sequencing and custom ML models to help dairy farmers make better breeding and herd management decisions. Our technology is genuinely novel: we can sequence a full genome from a single hair at a fraction of traditional industry costs, our models achieve ~90% prediction accuracy on traits where existing approaches sit closer to ~30%, and we’re pioneering farm-specific genomic predictions that turn genetics into practical, actionable decisions. That technology is translating into real adoption. In a short time, we’ve grown to serve roughly 1% of the U.S. dairy industry, with many customers in the pipeline. We started with dairy because our founders grew up on dairy farms and understand firsthand the problems we’re solving. But genetics is foundational to every agricultural industry, and dairy is only the beginning. We’re building Feanix with a small, high-caliber team where people have meaningful ownership and work end to end. There are no unnecessary layers and very little room for busywork — just difficult problems at the intersection of biology, data, and software that haven’t been solved before. If you’re exceptional at what you do and want your work to have a measurable impact on an entire industry, we’d love to build it with you. 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