Director of Software and Infrastructure
Full Time
Location: Preferred Montreal or Minneapolis based candidate, but open to remote
Our client is a fast-growing software company serving the global research and biomedical community. Their mission is to accelerate science through secure, scalable, and intuitive data infrastructure. They empower research teams with tools for secure collaboration, reproducibility, and responsible data sharing — at scale.
Position Summary
We’re seeking a Director of Software and Infrastructure to lead their growing engineering organization. We are looking for a leader who brings strength in software development, infrastructure security, DevOps, and test automation strategy at scale.
This role is ideal for someone who’s not just fluent in modern engineering practices — but who brings a builder’s mindset to operational maturity. You’re the kind of leader who proactively identifies weak spots before they become fires and makes actionable plans for your team. You understand what it takes to maintain security and reliability in FISMA Moderate-compliant environments, and how to translate that into culture, tooling, and team norms.
You’ll also be a magnet for talent — setting high standards and building a team that doesn’t just raise problems, but brings forward solutions, accountability, and action. You know how to scale fast without compromising quality, and you thrive in high-trust, high-performance environments where people are mission-aligned and driven to win.
Key Responsibilities
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Lead and oversee software engineering, testing and delivery — providing vision, structure, and accountability across all three pillars.
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Drive security and compliance — ensuring our architecture, processes, and tooling are rock-solid and FISMA Moderate-ready.
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Institutionalize quality engineering — build out our test automation, CI/CD observability, and reliability practices to raise release confidence and speed.
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Maintain and scale a healthy development culture — continuing to empower a motivated and high-velocity dev team already in flight.
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Build and mentor technical leaders across engineering departments, enabling ownership and execution without micro-management.
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Diagnose proactively, act decisively — instill a team-wide norm of solution-seeking, not problem-passing.
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Collaborate with product, security, and compliance leads to ensure delivery is aligned with customer, regulatory, and business priorities.
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Drive continuous improvement in release frequency, lower bug counts, & engineering team experience.
Qualifications
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10+ years of experience in software engineering or infrastructure, with 3+ years in senior technical leadership roles.
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Proven success overseeing platform engineering functions in startup or scale-up environments.
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Deep experience implementing and operationalizing security controls (especially FISMA Moderate, FedRAMP, HIPAA, GDPR or equivalent).
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Hands-on strong familiarity with Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, Infrastructure as Code, and automation-first infrastructure design.
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Strong familiarity with LLMs and AI tooling in operational and product contexts.
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Strong background in test strategy and automation frameworks — including CI/CD, test coverage reporting, and release gates.
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Prior experience scaling infra and security functions through major growth stages.
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Track record of shipping high-quality software quickly with strong reliability and observability baked in.
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History of building high-accountability teams that seek solutions, communicate clearly, and move fast.
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Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
Preferred Qualifications
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Experience in biomedical, life sciences, or research infrastructure domains.
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Comfort leading distributed, multi-time-zone teams.
Work Environment & Benefits
- Preferred office hubs in Minneapolis, MN or Montreal, QC
- Competitive salary and equity package.
- Fast-paced, mission-driven team building tools that matter.