Director of Engineering

Nox Metals is an AI-powered metals supplier building vertically integrated, automated factories that turn raw metal into production-ready material faster, cheaper, and more reliably than legacy service centers. The factory is the product. It operates in Metro Detroit and Los Angeles and supplies aluminum plate, bar, and rounds to aerospace and defense manufacturers. The company runs on its own software, NOX NEST, WAYNE, and Gondor. Aluminum plate and block are live today. Steel, tube, and sheet are next, and a second factory is going up in Los Angeles.

The CEO came through YC S25. Nox went from zero to $14 million in revenue in its first year. After an $11.5 million seed from Hyperion, Palmer Luckey, and YC, it raised a $45 million Series A from a tier-one investor, still unannounced, at about a $500 million valuation. A long-term agreement with SpaceX, on the order of $7 million a month, is in progress. Series A, about 51 to 200 people, founded in 2025.

Nox Metals is hiring a director of engineering to build the software organization and the systems that run the company. You own technical direction, engineering execution, and team development across customer software, internal operations, data, infrastructure, and applied machine learning. It is a hands-on leadership seat. You make architecture and hiring decisions and stay close to the code, the factory floor, and the people using what you build. The point is a faster, more reliable American metals supply chain.

The bar is less about deep manufacturing experience and more about having applied frontier technology at scale inside a company that won. They want someone who shipped something genuinely compelling, AI or another breakthrough, inside a winning organization. A founding technical lead seat at a startup that never got good is a miss. They want someone hungry and still on the rise, who other engineers gravitate toward, ideally with a network, because you recruit alongside the founders constantly. A high-performing senior engineer on a clear leadership path can come in as director. Someone who has already been a director by scope also works. The founders are strong at zero to one. What they need is the person who can scale the team from one to many.

You set the technical strategy and the engineering roadmap. You recruit, develop, and lead the team. You establish architecture across customer, commercial, and manufacturing systems. You stay close enough to review critical designs and unblock hard work. You turn company priorities into plans, owners, and dates. You raise the bar for reliability, security, testing, observability, and documentation. You work with sales, operations, finance, and manufacturing. You build a culture of speed, judgment, ownership, and direct contact with users. You make build-versus-buy calls, and you measure whether engineering improves the customer experience and factory performance.

Bar: about 5 to 10 years. Winning-organization experience is the screen. School is a signal they look at, with Georgia Tech and Harvey Mudd named as favorites, and a winning organization plus demonstrated technical work is the real bar. Ex-SpaceX, especially a mechanical-to-software path, and applied frontier profiles such as Rainmaker, Anduril, or a top AI or hardware organization are green flags. Manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, industrial software, optimization, data products, production machine learning, and having scaled a team are pluses. No winning-organization experience, coasting, a pure individual contributor with no leadership pull, a manager who has gone hands-off, or someone who only optimizes the local problem with no long-term architecture is a miss.

In office in Los Angeles. Visa sponsorship is not available. Equity is about 0.1% to 1%. Company-paid medical, dental, and vision. Posted work intensity is 9-9-5. The process is an intro call, then an in-person meeting with the founders: dinner, a walk of the factory floor, and a working session on what the software organization should become. A founder flies to Los Angeles, or the candidate flies out. If the CEO is in Detroit, that part can be on video.