Head of Engineering

At Medra, our mission is to use AI, robotics, and biology to accelerate life science research, with the ultimate goal of eradicating disease. We are building a Continuous Science Platform that helps scientists scale their lab work and generate orders of magnitude more data than before, whether to bring a new life‑saving drug to the clinic or to train a ground‑breaking biology foundation model.

We are primarily a software team, with experts in robotics, LLMs, and multimodal models. We believe that a small team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.

We are based in the Mission district of San Francisco, fully in‑person.

Role

As Head of Engineering at Medra, you’ll be leading the engineering org during an exciting phase of scaling customer deployments and fast‑paced product development. You’ll report to the CEO and be a core part of the executive team, helping shape the direction of the company.

Your mission

As Head of Engineering, you'll drive three key areas :

Engineering excellence across domains

Lead our technical vision and execution. While your main expertise should be in software, you will oversee diverse technical domains for product development : AI, user interface, infrastructure, robotics software, and hardware. You are able to translate ambiguity into clear technical plans, scoping the smallest viable solution, testing fast, and iterating relentlessly.

Strategic leadership & product partnership

You will partner with the CEO to shape our company direction. You will meet with our customers to understand their needs and work closely with our CEO to develop our strategic product roadmap.

Team growth

Build and scale a high‑performing engineering organization. We are working on cutting edge technology in robotics and agentic AI, so you will hire some of the most technical talent in very competitive industries. You are able to build a durable culture of psychological safety, high ownership, and constant feedback for growth.

Who you are

We're looking for someone who combines technical excellence with strong leadership abilities and strategic thinking. The ideal candidate will be excited about building both great products and great teams, with a passion for building for the physical world.

Must have

Experience leading, managing, and building high‑caliber engineering teams, and want to lead from the front

Strong technical background in software engineering. Can roll up sleeves to program and ship features, if necessary.

Past experience shipping software on hardware (e.g. robotics, self‑driving car, AR, IoT, microcontrollers, etc). Understanding of the AI landscape (in particular vision language models, agentic LLM models, and developer productivity tools)

Strong product intuition and strategic thinking

Ability to create clarity and ship in a rapidly shifting ambiguous environment

Experience building at early stage

Nice to have

Expertise in robotics and / or hardware

Experience with building and deploying AI models

History of successful collaboration or co‑development with external customers

Medra is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. We value diversity at Medra and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

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