Director of Software Engineering, Texas Institute of Electronics Full-time

Director of Software Engineering, Texas Institute of Electronics

Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE) is a transformative, well-funded semiconductor foundry venture combining the agility of a startup with the scale of a national initiative.

A key part of our mission is to advance the state of the art in 3D heterogeneous integration (3DHI), chiplet-based architectures, and multi-component microsystems- catalyzing breakthroughs across microelectronics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, high-performance computing, and next-generation healthcare devices.

Backed by $1.4 billion in combined funding from DARPA, Texas state initiatives, and strategic partners, we are building foundational capabilities in advanced packaging and integrated design infrastructure to restore U.S. leadership in microelectronics manufacturing.

Our 3DHI and chiplet integration platforms integrate novel thermal management and advanced interconnect solutions to deliver unprecedented performance and energy efficiency. Operating at the intersection of defense electronics and commercial markets, TIE offers a rare opportunity to reimagine an industry from the ground up and build transformative products with global impact.

UT Austin, recognized by Forbes as one of America's Best Large Employers, provides outstanding employee benefits and total rewards packages that include:

• Competitive health benefits (employee premiums covered at 100%, family premiums at 50%)
• Voluntary Vision, Dental, Life, and Disability insurance options
• Generous paid vacation, sick time, and holidays
• Teachers Retirement System of Texas, a defined benefit retirement plan, with 8.25% employer matching funds
• Additional Voluntary Retirement Programs: Tax Sheltered Annuity 403(b) and a Deferred Compensation program 457(b)
• Flexible spending account options for medical and childcare expenses
• Robust free training access through LinkedIn Learning plus professional conference opportunities
• Tuition assistance
• Expansive employee discount program including athletic tickets
• Free access to UT Austin's libraries and museums with staff ID card
• Free rides on all UT Shuttle and Austin CapMetro buses with staff ID card

Purpose

The Director of Software Engineering will lead the architecture and implementation of a scalable AI infrastructure platform, managing a high-caliber engineering team to ensure performance, security, and reliability while collaborating cross-functionally to align engineering priorities with product goals.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the software architecture and implementation roadmap for a scalable, modular AI infrastructure platform. You will work across backend, orchestration, and deployment layers—focusing on performance, security, and reliability.
• Build and manage a high-caliber engineering team, including backend developers, platform engineers, and site reliability engineers. You will be responsible for mentoring, hiring, and setting a culture of technical excellence and operational discipline.
• Own core services that power AI pipelines, including APIs for data ingestion and transformation, orchestration of model inference jobs, and integration with LLM orchestration layers and vector stores.
• Establish technical strategy and design standards that support rapid prototyping, automated testing, and code reuse across teams. You will define best practices and lead by example in system design, code reviews, and architectural discussions.
• Lead on-premise deployment strategy, ensuring our stack is optimized for hybrid environments. You will manage challenges around air-gapped deployments, resource management, and update rollouts in constrained environments.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with AI engineering, product management, and customer success to align engineering priorities with product goals. You'll help translate high-level needs into deliverable milestones.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices, focusing on security, observability, rollback safety, and developer productivity.
• Develop and enforce SLAs/SLOs for critical services, putting in place monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices that ensure uptime and stability in enterprise-grade deployments.
• Stay on top of evolving technologies in distributed systems, containerization, service mesh, observability, and developer tooling—bringing in the best ideas to future-proof our platform.
• Other related functions as assigned.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or a related field; strong systems programming fundamentals.
• 8 or more years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or management role.
• Track record of building and deploying distributed backend systems that operate at scale, with a strong emphasis on system reliability and maintainability.
• Deep experience with containerized environments and orchestration, including Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, and related tooling.
• Fluency in modern backend programming languages such as Go, Rust, Python, or Java.
• Hands-on experience managing hybrid or on-prem enterprise software deployments, including troubleshooting networking, storage, and computer issues in real-world installations.
• Demonstrated ability to lead high-performance engineering teams, with a focus on hiring, mentoring, and cultivating engineering excellence.
• Strong communication and documentation skills—able to synthesize complex technical topics for a variety of audiences and align stakeholders toward shared goals.
• Startup mindset. You thrive in ambiguity, adapt quickly, and are comfortable working hands-on across multiple layers of the tech stack.
• Relevant education and experience may be substituted as appropriate.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master of Science in Computer Science or Engineering.
• Experience building data-intensive or ML-heavy software products, including APIs for inference, data pipelines, and real-time analytics.
• Familiarity with API design (REST/gRPC/OpenAPI) and interfacing with AI model serving stacks (e.g., vLLM, Triton, custom TorchServe).
• Experience with secure software development and compliance in regulated environments (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, FedRAMP).
• Contributions to open-source projects or strong technical thought leadership in the cloud-native or ML infrastructure communities.
• Experience building platforms or developer tools used by external customers or partners.

Salary Range

TIE pays industry-competitive salaries

Working Conditions

• May work around standard office conditions
• Repetitive use of a keyboard at a workstation
• Use of manual dexterity (ex: using a mouse)

Work Shift

• Monday – Friday
• Occasional/frequent nights/weekends required

Required Materials

• Resume/CV
• 3 work references with their contact information; at least one reference should be from a supervisor
• Letter of interest (optional)