As Head of Software Engineering, you will lead a high-output team building the infrastructure that gives AI agents physical-world access. You’ll serve as a player-coach, owning the engineering roadmap and technical architecture while remaining hands-on. Your work directly enables frontier AI labs and biopharmas to accelerate protein design and experimental iteration.
Head of Software Engineering at Adaptyv Bio
Adaptyv Bio is building the physical infrastructure for the era of agentic science, and they need a Head of Software Engineering to lead the charge. This player-coach role offers the unique opportunity to bridge the gap between AI models and automated laboratories, orchestrating million-dollar hardware through a sophisticated software stack. If you are an AI-native leader who still loves shipping code and wants to empower AI agents to run real-world biology experiments, this is your chance to join one of the fastest-growing companies in biotech and define the future of automated discovery.
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Location
Lausanne, Switzerland
Compensation
Not Disclosed
Company
Adaptyv Bio
Role overview
Adaptyv is building an automated lab thats let AI agents run biology experiments.
We’re entering the era of agentic science where AI models can now design novel proteins, propose hypotheses, and iterate on experimental results. But they can’t run the experiments themselves - that’s still a manual, months-long process. We’re building the infrastructure that gives AI agents access to the physical world.
Today, over 50 companies are already running their wet lab experiments on Adaptyv, ranging from some of the biggest biopharmas, to frontier AI labs to dozens of techbio startups.
Our automated lab is powered by a deep software + hardware stack: lab instruments worth millions of USD reverse-engineered into API-controllable hardware, dozens of devices orchestrated through complex workflows, full observability on everything that happens in the lab, processing pipelines for messy physical-world data, and AI systems that troubleshoot production results and accelerate assay development.
We’re growing rapidly and are hiring for talented people to scale and support the massive demand for AI-driven wet lab experimentation.
What you will do
- Own the end-to-end engineering roadmap, making critical decisions on technical direction across frontend, backend, data pipelines, and hardware integration.
- Lead, hire, and mentor a technical engineering team while remaining a “player-coach” who actively ships code on the most high-leverage challenges.
- Architect and maintain complex software systems that orchestrate dozens of lab devices, ensuring high observability and reliability for critical physical experiments.
Who this is a fit for
- Extensive experience shipping production software and leading high-growth engineering teams where speed and quality are prioritized.
- Proven track record of owning technical roadmaps and making pragmatic architectural trade-offs in a startup or fast-paced environment.
- Mastery of modern AI-assisted development tools and a visionary outlook on how AI agents will reshape software engineering workflows by 2026.
Why this role is remarkable
- You will build the infrastructure for “agentic science,” bridging the gap between digital AI models and physical wet-lab experiments through million-dollar automated hardware.
- Work at the forefront of biotech in a rapidly growing company trusted by leading biopharmas and frontier AI labs to push the field forward.
- Define the future of engineering by building an AI-native development culture where LLMs and agents are core to the team’s speed and architectural capabilities.
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