Director, Software Engineering

About this role

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Build…