Technical Director - Scientific/Chemical Software

About Our Company

We are a life-sciences software company, founded in 2000, that builds and supports chemical inventory, laboratory safety, and R&D-workflow applications for global pharmaceutical and biotech customers. Our flagship platforms and companion products work together to give bench scientists and lab operations teams fast, compliant access to chemical inventory. Adjacent products that manage synthesis outsourcing workflow and instrument tracking extend our footprint deeper into pharma R&D operations.

We are in the middle of modernizing our technology: moving from Oracle, IIS, ---------- Framework/WebForms and onto PostgreSQL, Node.js (Fastify), React, React Native, and Linux (RHEL) — while continuing to support mission-critical legacy installations our customers depend on today. All of our development, production, and customer-hosted environments run in our own AWS virtual private cloud, including a single-tenant hosted (SaaS) offering for customers who access our products remotely rather than on-premises, some using their own Okta identity provider for single sign-on. Our applications' chemistry capabilities currently run on the Chemaxon (now Certara) JChem cartridge and Marvin/ChemDraw editors; we are actively working to both migrate to Chemaxon's newer Choral platform and open up a path to open-source cheminformatics (such as RDKit) and open-source molecular editors.

The Role

The Technical Director will directly manage our engineering team's day-to-day development work — d ---------- what gets built and how, reviewing and guiding the team's technical output, and ensuring engineering effort stays aligned with architecture strategy and business priority.

Presently, our founders and a small group of senior engineers share responsibility for architecture decisions, vendor and licensing management, and senior technical relationships with our largest customers — alongside a small team that is simultaneously maintaining a large, mission-critical legacy ---------- estate and building out our open-source stack. We are looking for a Technical Director to take direct, consolidated ownership of the entire technical landscape: setting and executing architecture strategy, leading our stack modernization and cheminformatics transition, growing and mentoring the engineering team, and representing the company credibly in technical conversations with large enterprise customers and their IT organizations.

Titles can be a little misleading at a company our size: this is a deeply hands-on, technical role. Initially, you will personally perform a myriad of technical work — troubleshooting production issues, running builds, and executing deployments — while building genuine expertise across as much of our technical landscape as possible, quickly coming up to speed in areas outside your current experience, and working alongside the team with genuine enthusiasm. As the team and company grow, this role will naturally evolve toward a more traditional director-level scope, but the immediate need is for a hands-on technical owner.

This role reports directly to the founders and will be the senior-most technical authority in the company. You will inherit a real, partially-executed modernization strategy — including a working reference architecture (a Fastify/PostgreSQL/React/RHEL pattern already proven on an existing product) — and a mandate to extend it deliberately across the rest of the portfolio rather than one-off improvisation.

This role is empowered to bring in, where needed, specialized contractor support — whether in-house or external — for specific, highly technical needs you are not yet able to handle independently. You are not expected to initially be the expert in everything, but any outside expertise you engage must be closely managed, with the resulting procedures and protocols thoroughly documented and internalized by the team. The goal is always to add lasting value to the company's internal expertise and remove ongoing dependency on external resources.

Ownership

Architecture & modernization strategy

• Own the technical roadmap for migrating our applications from Oracle, IIS, ---------- Framework onto PostgreSQL, Node.js/Fastify, React, React Native, and Linux (RHEL) — extending the pattern already established on one application to our flagship product lines.
• D ---------- , case by case, when a product should be rebuilt vs. incrementally modernized vs. maintained as-is, and make that case to the founders and, where relevant, to customers.
• Establish and enforce formalized technical leadership and engineering standards (code review, testing, deployment, documentation) across the team.

Team leadership

• Directly manage and direct the engineering team's day-to-day development work — assigning and prioritizing technical tasks, reviewing code and technical output, and unblocking technical problems as they arise.
• Grow engineering capability and reduce single-point-of-failure risk.
• Mentor and manage a distributed team spanning ---------- /Oracle maintenance and open-source full-stack platform development; hire as the team grows.
• Work closely with the Senior Project Manager to translate technical priorities into a tracked delivery plan, providing the technical judgment needed for realistic sequencing and timeline commitments.
• Engage specialty contractors or consultants — in-house or external — for specific, highly technical needs, and ensure the resulting procedures and protocols are internalized and documented by the core team.

Cloud infrastructure management

• Own our AWS-hosted infrastructure end to end — virtual private cloud and network design, compute and database provisioning, security groups, backup and disaster-recovery policy, and cost management — across development, production, and customer-hosted environments.
• Manage our single-tenant, hosted (SaaS) deployment model for customers who access our products remotely rather than on-premises, including provisioning, certificate and DNS lifecycle management, identity-provider (e.g., Okta SAML) integration, and u ---------- commitments.
• Modernize infrastructure operations that are currently manual and concentrated in a single administrator — moving toward infrastructure-as-code, automated certificate and secrets management, and clearer environment isolation and access control.

Cheminformatics technology strategy

• Lead migration from Chemaxon's legacy JChem Oracle cartridge and MarvinJS editor to the newer Choral cartridge and next-generation Marvin — including any associated backend rendering-logic, not just the front-end editor updates.
• Design and deliver a supported open-source cheminformatics alternative built on chosen and identified open-source platforms, for example, RDKit, and extend our applications' existing pluggable structure-editor architecture to a fully open-source alternative for customers.
• Coordinate Chemaxon/Certara vendor management as needed, with the goal of owning the technical and commercial aspects of this relationship.

Customer & vendor technical engagement

• Serve as the company's senior technical point of contact for enterprise customers' IT and security organizations — including navigating large-company processes like ServiceNow, Jira, and API-gateway governance (e.g., integrating with customer procurement platforms via exposed APIs or managed gateways such as MuleSoft) — where progress often depends more on stakeholder navigation than raw engineering effort.
• Represent the company in technical evaluations with prospective new teams inside existing accounts (e.g., an active evaluation by a customer's European R&D group considering one of our products as a replacement for an in-house procurement/inventory system).

Security & documentation governance

• Establish credential-management and secrets-handling practices across the company's technical estate, and drive remediation of any outstanding cloud security findings (e.g., unresolved monitoring alerts, overly broad network access).
• Bring rigorous, reproducible engineering and architecture documentation practices — our enterprise customers require vendor continuity and documentation sufficiency for a successor team, and this should be treated as a competitive and contractual asset, not overhead.

Legacy system stewardship

• Ensure our large legacy ---------- Framework/WebForms codebases remain stable, secure, and supportable for customers who are not yet ready to move to the new open-source stack.

What We Are Looking For

Required

• Significant professional software engineering experience — 10+ years is typical, but exceptional candidates with less experience who demonstrate strong architecture and technical leadership ability are encouraged to apply — including experience in a technical leadership, architecture, or engineering-management role.
• Genuine enthusiasm for hands-on execution — writing code, troubleshooting production issues, running builds, and executing deployments — not just directing others. At our current size, this is much of the job day to day; the role is expected to evolve toward a more traditional director scope as the team grows.
• Direct, hands-on experience leading a legacy-to-open-source technology migration — ideally something structurally similar to ours: Oracle ? PostgreSQL, .NET Framework ? Node.js/React, and/or Windows/IIS ? Linux.
• Working proficiency with our target stack: Node.js/TypeScript, an open-source web framework (Fastify or similar), React, PostgreSQL, and Linux server administration (RHEL or another enterprise Linux distribution).
• Experience configuring nginx (or equivalent) as a reverse proxy for Node.js APIs, and running Node services in production with a process manager such as pm2 (cluster mode, log management, zero-downtime deploys).
• Hands-on experience managing AWS (or comparable cloud provider) infrastructure — VPC and network design, compute and database provisioning, security groups, bac