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