Associate Director, Operations in Cambridge

The Broad Institute is building agentic AI systems to accelerate the work of scientists at the institute and across the world in fields such as genomics, genetics, virology, and more. This goal requires significant engineering expertise as we build infrastructure capable of supporting the workloads of AI co-scientists. This exciting work will lay the foundation for scientific discovery loops where the massive data collection efforts at the Broad Institute are paired with AI systems to make observations, generate hypotheses, and design experiments that will enable us to learn fundamental biology at unprecedented scale.

Role Overview
The Associate Director drives the design, development, and operation of large‑scale infrastructure that powers the Broad Institute’s scientific discovery and sharing. This role blends agentic software engineering, data science, DevOps, and platform architecture, ensuring that scientific workflows run reliably, efficiently, and at massive scale where required. The Associate Director, Software Engineering works closely with computational scientists, operations teams, and external collaborators to transform research prototypes into production‑grade systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Direct technical design and implementation for new agentic capabilities, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Guide teams in collaborating with scientific and engineering teams to translate research requirements into robust production systems.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices for agentic engineering and DevOps, observability, infrastructure automation, and cloud operations.
• Manage and mentor senior engineers while driving long‑term platform strategy.
• Lead a high-performing team, directly managing 1–2 initial reports with the opportunity to scale the team as organizational funding permits

Required Qualifications

• Agentic engineering fluency and proficiency with recent LLM ecosystems (e.g. claude, Codex, Copilot)
• BS with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time leading engineering teams in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles, or a Master's and 8+ years of related experience, or a PhD and 5+ years of related experience.
• 5+ years' management experience required.
• Demonstrated ability to oversee the design and delivery of high‑scale, distributed systems in cloud environments (AWS or GCP).
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure‑as‑code, containerization, and cloud‑native operations.
• Experience with modern database systems (relational, document, graph, etc.)
• Ability to align and communicate complex technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders.
• Proven track record of leading teams effectively in fast‑paced, cross‑disciplinary environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading initiatives that support scientific computing, bioinformatics workflows, or large‑scale data processing pipelines.
• Experience overseeing the integration of heterogeneous systems across research, clinical, and operational domains.
• Prior work managing operations in mission‑critical environments with strict reliability and throughput requirements.