Senior Developer Experience EngineerHouston; San Francisco; Seattle; New York
The RoleThis is a senior engineering role for someone who sets the bar for how Nscale ships software and then pulls the rest of the team up to it. You'll own the hardest problems on the delivery platform: the GitHub, GitOps, and change automation every engineer depends on, and the design decisions that decide whether it holds up as the company grows. Your customers are internal developers, and the measure of the job is how quickly and safely they get to production.
What You'll Do- Own the delivery platform end to end, from pull request to production. Set the roadmap and the direction, not just respond to what breaks or what gets requested.
- Define the paved road: golden paths, repo and workflow templates, release conventions, and deployment standards that make the safe way to ship also the easy way.
- Own the internal developer portal (Backstage or equivalent) as the front door to the paved road: the service catalog, software templates, and docs, with adoption and ownership data to show it is used.
- Set the technical direction for GitOps across Argo CD and Flux, including multi-cluster promotion, drift detection, and a clear position on when to use which.
- Own the build and release layer and its performance: build tooling, remote caching, container image builds, base images, the artifact registry, and release versioning and promotion, so builds are fast, reproducible, and cheap to run.
- Own local and ephemeral test environments, including LocalStack, so engineers can test against cloud APIs on a laptop or in CI before anything reaches a shared environment.
- Design and lead change management automation into Jira Service Management, working with Security, audit, and engineering leadership so that evidence, risk tiering, and approvals come from the pipeline instead of from manual tickets.
- Set the SLOs and SLIs for the delivery platform (lead time, deploy success rate, CI queue time, rollback time) and use adoption and developer feedback data to decide what to build next.
- Grow the team, not just the systems. Mentor engineers through design review, pairing, and incident debriefs, and hold the bar for quality and maintainability.
- Get in early on design reviews and architecture decisions across Engineering, so deployability, rollback, and change requirements are built in from the start.
- Lead the hardest delivery platform incidents and the root causes nobody else can crack, and turn each one into a change that keeps it from coming back.
- Influence without authority. Bring other teams onto shared tooling by earning their trust, retiring the old way, and showing the numbers.
What You'll Bring- 6-10 years in platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering, with real ownership of CI/CD or deployment systems used by many engineering teams.
- Strong software engineering skills (Python, Go, or similar). You build tools other engineers adopt, not scripts that run once and rot.
- Deep experience with GitHub at organization scale (Actions, self-hosted runners, rulesets, permissions and governance) and with GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux, or both) on Kubernetes.
- Experience automating change management or release approval against a ticketing system, ideally Jira Service Management, and the judgment to balance compliance needs against developer speed.
- Solid command of Kubernetes, Linux, networking, and distributed systems, with the sense to know where the real failure modes hide.
- Experience with secrets and identity in pipelines (Vault, short-lived credentials, OIDC) and with artifact and supply chain management.
- Ownership of a build and release system at scale, including build performance, reproducibility, cache strategy, release versioning and promotion, runner fleet capacity and cost, and artifact registry design.
- Experience designing and running an internal developer platform, including a developer portal (Backstage or similar), and driving adoption across engineering teams.
- Reliability practices you put in place that outlasted you: SLOs, observability and alerting, incident process, and on-call that people can actually live with.
- A track record of treating developers as customers: surveys, adoption metrics, documentation, and deprecating tools that no longer earn their place.
- A track record as a trusted senior voice in design reviews and incidents, able to make the call under pressure.
- A habit of raising the people around you without being asked to.
Nice to Have- Local cloud emulation (LocalStack or similar) and ephemeral or preview environments.
- Policy as code (OPA or Kyverno), Terraform automation, and software supply chain practices such as SBOMs and image signing.
- Experience with AI or GPU workloads, high-performance computing, or bare-metal environments, so you understand the people and workloads you are building for.
On-Call and PaceA quick note on the shape of the job. This role supports the systems engineers use to ship, so there is an on-call rotation for the delivery platform, and some weeks are busier than others. As a senior on the team, you help set how that rotation runs and, more to the point, how we make it lighter over time. We share the load fairly, and we treat every page as a signal worth acting on rather than just an interruption. The goal is to leave the platform quieter than you found it.
What We Offer- Competitive base plus equity, reviewed every 12 months.
- Real ownership from the start, and a direct hand in how software reaches production across the platform.
- Flexibility that treats you as an adult; we care that the work gets done, and we trust you to shape your day.
Salary Range$170,000 - $265,000 USD. Actual compensation varies with skill set, experience, and location, and the role may be eligible for bonus and equity.
