Associate Director of Engineering

Your work will change lives. Including your own. 

The Impact You’ll Make

As the manager of multiple engineering teams, you will play a critical role in navigating Recursion’s strategic landscape.  These teams bring an engineering skillset to bear across domains and functions.  They don’t have a curated backlog of problems to solve- they are partners in understanding the strategic landscape and identifying the problems themselves.  Managers in this space must be able to partner across functions, navigate ambiguity, and lead teams through change.

The value of your work will hinge not on what your team builds but in the scientific outcomes they drive.  You and your team will need to understand how drug discovery at Recursion works to be successful.  You will need to work through ambiguity and an evolving strategic landscape to identify the right problems to solve.  Your team might create and optimize pipelines that analyze biological data, curate data products, automate manual processes, rearchitect existing systems to align with current technical strategy, or build dashboards that power scientific decision making.  

In this role, you will:

• Lead high-performing teams of software engineers that consistently move the needle on Recursion’s goals.  
• Align your teams’ roadmap and goals to broader technical and business strategy. AI-enabled drug discovery is a complex landscape. Our teams need leaders who understand and advocate for engineering best practices and technical strategy in pursuit of business strategy.  Every leader brings their functional expertise to bear in identifying the problems we need to solve and leading the teams that solve those problems.
• Drive delivery of scientific outcomes. Our mission isn’t to build software–we are discovering drugs through the application of technology. Software engineering is a critical skillset for our teams facilitating our mission of decoding biology to radically improve lives.
• Foster the professional development of your team members by setting clear expectations, providing coaching, and holding them accountable. We build and run teams of highly motivated and talented engineers, setting them up for growth and impact is critical.
• Empower your teams to deeply own their business domain, collaborate across teams and functions, and drive towards scientific outcomes. Our engineering teams don’t have tasks handed to them, they must be able to navigate cross-functional domains to identify and solve complex problems.

The Teams You’ll Join 

• The Biology Analytics Stream-Aligned Team is a team of engineers that partner closely with our Platform Development Data Science Teams.  They build and operate our phenomics and transcriptomics analysis pipelines and will be key partners in development of new biological assays and analyses.  They leverage a deep understanding of our end-to-end biological analysis pipelines to automate away manual toil and provide visibility into the status of processing and analysis pipelines.  This team is based in Salt Lake City and highly values opportunities to work together in person.  

• The Tactical Acceleration Team is a team of autonomous engineers who identify and act on opportunities across the organization to accelerate the work of other teams.  They deeply understand our internal platforms and technical strategy and can apply it in diverse situations to solve complex problems.  In one quarter they might partner closely with a team to port a critical system that uses outdated technologies to a “golden path” that aligns with our current technical strategy, leaving the owner team with a system that is easier to maintain and evolve.  In another quarter, they might work closely with our Data Science teams to develop a new analysis pipeline.

The Experience You’ll Need

• 5+ years professional engineering experience.
  Excitement to learn parts of our tech stack that you might not already know. Our current tech stack primarily consists of Python, JavaScript (React), PostgreSQL, deployed to Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform.
• 3+ years of professional engineering management experience.
• Experience collaborating to complete large projects. We don't have much in the way of project managers.
• A people-first mindset. Despite the deadlines, we always prioritize supporting our coworkers in their growth and experience.
• Biology or chemistry background is not necessary, but intellectual curiosity is a must!

Working Location:

This position is based at our office located in Salt Lake City. Please note that we are a hybrid environment and ask that employees spend 50% of their time per week in office. 

#LI-CP1

At Recursion, we believe that every employee should be compensated fairly. Based on the skill and level of experience required for this role, the estimated current annual base range for this role is:

• Developing: $192,000
• Skilled: $203,000
• Expert: $217,000

To learn more about our level within levels, click here.

You will also be eligible for bonuses and equity compensation + our comprehensive benefits package for United States based candidates. The range displayed on each job posting reflects target ranges for US new hire salaries and is determined by job, level, and market factors.  

During the interview selection process, you will connect with a Talent Acquisition Partner who will be your advocate and ally to ensure you receive the appropriate compensation that meets your needs for your skills, experience, and relevant education/training, while also reviewing our very competitive total rewards package.

The Values That We Hope You Share:

• We Care: We care about our drug candidates, our Recursionauts, their families, each other, our communities, the patients we aim to serve and their loved ones. We also care about our work.
• We Learn: Learning from the diverse perspectives of our fellow Recursionauts, and from failure, is an essential part of how we make progress.
• We Deliver: We are unapologetic that our expectations for delivery are extraordinarily high. There is urgency to our existence: we sprint at maximum engagement, making time and space to recover. 
• Act Boldly with Integrity: No company changes the world or reinvents an industry without being bold. It must be balanced; not by timidity, but by doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
• We are One Recursion: We operate with a 'company first, team second' mentality. Our success comes from working as one interdisciplinary team.

Recursion spends time and energy connecting every aspect of work to these values. They aren’t static, but regularly discussed and questioned because we make decisions rooted in those values in our day-to-day work. You can read more about our values and how we live them every day here.

More About Recursion 

Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology and chemistry to advance the future of medicine.

Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in London, Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer that values diversity and inclusion.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation. 

Recursion welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.