Director/VP of Software

Help define the future of hardware development by building a collaboration platform for circuit designs, enabling the next generation of smart vehicles, IoT devices, rockets, medical devices, robotics, and much more.

At AllSpice, we're building the agile development environment for hardware designers, including a Git-friendly translation layer and automated CI/CD framework for native circuit designs — think GitHub/GitLab + Copilot for electronics.

Read more about our latest Series A announcement here!

As Director/VP of Software, you will own AllSpice's product development strategy and lead a growing engineering organization. Reporting directly to the CTO, this is first and foremost a leadership role: you'll set technical direction, translate customer and business needs into clear goals and priorities, and give your teams the alignment and just-enough structure they need to ship. Today that means leading ~3 technical team leads, with the mandate to grow and shape the org as we scale.

You'll spend most of your time on the people and the plan—coaching team leads, sharpening how work gets prioritized and delivered, and keeping engineering pointed at the outcomes that matter most to customers. You'll stay close enough to the architecture and codebase to make sound calls and earn your engineers' trust; a genuine enjoyment of occasionally getting hands-on in the code is a plus, not a requirement.

If you're passionate about growing high-performing teams and turning customer needs into shipped product, this role is for you.

What you'll do

This is a high-impact role that comes with significant autonomy and requires a self-driven, strategic, and collaborative leader. You will own product development across the full stack — from our Go back-end and Rust parsing layer to our Vue/TypeScript front-end.

Strategic leadership and architecture

• Own AllSpice's product development roadmap in close partnership with the CTO and Product Management
• Make architectural decisions that balance speed, scalability, and technical quality across multiple teams
• Align engineering priorities with business goals and customer needs, translating product requirements into clear technical plans
• Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and manage technical debt strategically

People management and team building

• Oversee and mentor ~5 technical team leads, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Hire, develop, and retain top engineering talent as the organization scales
• Set team goals, define development processes, and drive operational cadence (sprints, standups, retrospectives)
• Create growth paths for individual contributors and managers alike
• Participate in code reviews, architecture discussions, and incident response when needed

Cross-functional communication

• Serve as the primary connector between technical teams (Platform, Parsing, GenAI, Front-end), facilitating alignment and removing blockers
• Partner closely with Infrastructure to ensure smooth deployments, performance, and reliability of production systems
• Work with Customer Success and Sales to understand customer pain points and feed insights back into the development process
• Represent Engineering in cross-functional planning, providing realistic timelines and trade-off analysis

Hands-on engineering

• Jump in with engineers to debug, prototype, and solve complex problems when needed — especially in areas spanning multiple teams
• Drive end-to-end web performance analysis and optimization across the stack
• Maintain a high standard of technical quality through architecture guidance, code review, and mentorship
• Engage with open-source communities used in our software to upstream relevant changes and influence key decisions

Example projects

• Analyze and improve end-to-end web performance: from server response times through rendering of complex CAD documents (100k+ elements)
• Lead the development of a 3D rendering engine for PCBs
• Architect scalable APIs and data models for CAD documents stored in Git repositories
• Drive expansion of ECAD format support (e.g., LTSpice, KiCad, additional formats)
• Guide the GenAI/DRCY team on integrating AI-powered design review deeper into the product, including PCB analysis and extended knowledge repositories
• Oversee implementation of cross-probing between schematic and PCB views
• Improve the snippet and diff rendering pipeline for accuracy and performance

Our stack

• Gitea application soft fork

  • Go [server-side]
  • Vue/TypeScript front-end

• Rust back-end parsing layer for ECAD files

• Intermediate data in JSON schema, exported to SVG for rendering

• Playwright for e2e testing

• GitHub Actions for CI/CD

• Docker Swarm & Terraform for deployment

• AWS

• PostgreSQL

Expectations

Our ideal candidate has:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant depth in web application development
• 2+ years of people management experience (hiring, mentoring, performance management)
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional engineering teams and drive product delivery end-to-end
• Experience aligning business and customer needs with technical solutions and capabilities
• Strong architectural instincts — you can operate at the high level and dive deep into implementation details
• Able to clearly explain the architecture, implementation, and trade-offs of systems you've built or led
• A sharp eye for anti-patterns and hidden pitfalls in development, paired with the willingness to get hands-on with implementation, observability, and test process as needed
• A track record of helping teams effectively adopt AI tools into their development workflows
• Project management skills with the ability to lead initiatives from engineers to customers
• Comfort with ambiguity and a high degree of autonomy
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a technology-related field
• (preference, not required) Availability to work out of our flex offices in San Francisco or Boston 1–2 days per week

Relevant skills

You don't need to check every box, but the more of these you bring, the better:

Languages and frameworks

• Go, TypeScript, Vue, Rust
• Common web architectures and interfaces
• SVG, CSS selectors (for design rendering)

Infrastructure and tooling

• Docker and Kubernetes
• CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Playwright)
• PostgreSQL administration
• AWS services

Engineering leadership

• Hiring, mentoring, and building engineering teams
• Agile project management (Jira, Notion, or similar)
• Customer-facing technical communication
• Facilitating AI workflow adoption
• Open-source community engagement

Domain knowledge (nice to have)

• Hardware / CAD / ECAD experience
• Algorithms, data structures, and performance optimization
• Parsing, rendering, or graphics programming
• AI/ML integration in product workflows

Benefits

• Opportunity to make a large impact at an executive level
• Supportive and smart colleagues
• Flexible work
• Competitive salary and equity
• Health, dental, and vision benefits
• Generous PTO
• Home office stipend
• Relocation package