Software Development Director
US$300,000 – US$390,000 / yr base salary
Posted 9 Jul 2026
Advertised as “Senior Director, Software Development, Test Automation”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 10+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$300,000 – US$390,000 / yr |
|---|
Your Impact at LILA
The Role
We're hiring a Senior Director, Software Development, Test Automation Systems to architect and build Lila's test automation platform and quality engineering practice for our AI-powered scientific and lab automation products. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you'll own the test automation system, CI/CD test infrastructure, AI-driven test tooling, and the eval discipline that hold the bar across our SDLC.
This is a builder-leader role. You will drive the quality vision, write requirements, make sharp build-vs-buy calls, drive execution, and build and lead a small (3–5 person) team that delivers leverage. The operating model is federated: you own the platform, standards, and metrics; engineering teams own test execution. You scale through tooling and influence.
As you scale into this role, you'll also stand up the QC framework for our lab automation system — the validation patterns, harnesses, and contracts that science operations teams will operate day-to-day. Data integrity and ALCOA+ compliance are foundational to everything you build.
What You'll Be Building
What You'll Do
Architect and ship the test automation platform
- Design and build the test automation platform — frameworks, fixtures, golden datasets, test orchestration, and reporting — that the engineering org adopts by default
- Set standards across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, regression, performance, and chaos testing for backend services, the frontend monorepo, and data pipelines
- Treat platform adoption, flake rate, and time-to-signal as first-class engineering metrics
Make build-vs-buy decisions with conviction
- Own the buy/build/borrow strategy across test infrastructure, eval platforms, browser/device clouds, observability, and lab QC tooling
- Justify every choice with TCO, signal quality, integration cost, and time-to-leverage — and revisit decisions as the org and tech landscape evolve
- Bias toward leverage: buy commodity capabilities, build the differentiators (Lila-specific AI evals, lab QC, scientific data integrity)
Modernize CI/CD for fast, reliable signal
- Own the test execution layer of CI/CD: parallelization, caching, hermetic environments, ephemeral preview envs, and affected-only test selection across our Nx monorepo/microservices.
- Build retry, quarantine, and impact-analysis systems so signal stays sharp as the org scales