VP Software Engineering, Robotics & System

Job description

Join the Future of Robotic Biomanufacturing! Multiply Labs is a robotics company on a mission to solve a significant bottleneck in modern medicine: the manufacturing of life-saving advanced biologics, from gene and cell therapies to antibodies and more. Today, these therapies are produced through manual, labor-intensive processes. Costs are extremely high—often $500K–$2M per patient—limiting access to only a small fraction of those who need them. As product complexity increases and the cost of failure and scientific labor rises, the industry is shifting toward automation. Robotics and AI are making automated biologics manufacturing feasible, reliable, and economically scalable. We believe the future of biomanufacturing is robotic—closed, automated, and scalable—ensuring critical therapeutics are accessible to every patient who needs them. Why This Matters We don’t just build robots; we build the infrastructure for the next generation of biologics manufacturing. Our technology allows biopharma companies to scale production without redesigning their science, drastically lowering regulatory hurdles and bringing costs down to a level where these treatments can actually reach patients. The Stack & The Scale The Mission: Build the world’s best robots to make life-saving therapies accessible to all. The Technology: Advanced robotic orchestration, high-precision automation, cloud-integrated hardware-software systems, dextrous manipulation, and imitation learning. The Location: Headquartered in San Francisco, CA. The Backing: Supported by premier investors, including Casdin Capital, Lux Capital, and Y Combinator. To learn more and to view a video of our robots in action, visit us at www.multiplylabs.com and follow us on LinkedIn. About the Role As our VP Software Engineering, Robotics & Systems, you will lead Multiply Labs’ growing software and robotics engineering organization during an exciting phase of scaling customer deployments and product evolution. You will report directly to the CEO and play a central leadership role on the executive team. We are looking for a collaborative technical leader to drive the strategic growth of our software engineering organization. You will manage the leads of our Robotics and Systems software teams, helping to scale our organization and professionalize our engineering practices while preserving the collaborative culture that makes our team unique. You are someone who can balance the strategic need for industry-standard processes with the startup need for speed and execution. Requirements: Engineering Excellence & Standards Lead Technical Evolution: Build upon our existing software architecture across Robotics (motion planning, kinematics) and Platform (cloud, scheduling, distributed systems). You will translate ambiguity into clear technical plans and scope minimum viable solutions, ensuring the stack remains robust and maintainable as system complexity increases. Innovation Transfer: Partner with our R D Software team to transition frontier robotic advancements into commercial production. You will bridge the gap between research and production, ensuring that experimental features are rigorously integrated and stabilized before they reach our deployed clusters. Standards Excellence: Evaluate our current Software Development Lifecycle and provide strategic feedback to close process gaps. You will guide the team in adopting and refining industry standards for code reviews, release management, versioning strategies, and technical documentation. Reliability Testing Strategy: Champion a strategy for mission-critical reliability. You will oversee the maturation of our testing frameworks—building on our existing simulation and integration tests—and guide the strategic ramp-up of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing. Requirements: Strategic Leadership & Product Partnership Product Alignment: Work alongside Hardware, Product, and Biology leadership to ensure software roadmaps align with physical constraints. You will help translate complex biological protocols and physical constraints into realistic software roadmaps. Customer Focus Technical Strategy: Occasionally meet with customers to understand their needs and ensure our engineering efforts are solving the right problems. You will use this context to define the strategy for balancing new feature delivery with the reduction of technical debt, ensuring sustainable velocity. Requirements: Team Growth & Culture Scale the Organization: You will prepare the engineering team for a critical phase of growth—moving from a single Process Development (PD) unit to a fleet operating in both PD and regulated GMP environments. You understand the operational rigor required to support commercial GMP systems without stifling the agility needed for ongoing development. Mentorship Career Guidance: You will take an active role in the professional development of your team. You will provide coaching, define clear career pathways, and ensure that engineers have the mentorship they need to evolve into technical leaders and effective managers. Team Culture Values: Champion our existing culture of positivity and collaboration, ensuring these values persist as the organization scales. You will foster an environment of high trust and personal ownership, where intellectual honesty is valued over ego. Qualifications 15+ years of software engineering experience , with a demonstrated track record of building and maintaining complex, high-reliability integrated software systems. Proven Scale: Track record of scaling engineering organizations beyond 20–50+ engineers. You have the strategic foresight to plan for future organizational needs and the experience to manage managers effectively, ensuring the leadership structure remains strong as the team grows. Strong Technical Background: While this is a leadership position, we expect you to have a strong software engineering background. You have the ability to guide the team effectively and, at times, s