Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Decagon

$200K — $400K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4+ years of experience in production software, particularly in platform, devtools, or infrastructure roles.
  • Strong coding proficiency in languages like Python or TypeScript/JS, with a focus on developer tooling.
  • Hands-on expertise in designing scalable CI/CD systems and pipelines.
  • Experience with observability practices in production environments, including instrumentation and alerting.
  • Familiarity with containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration using Kubernetes.
  • Demonstrated history of enhancing developer experience with measurable improvements.
  • Excellent cross-team collaboration and communication skills.

Responsibilities

  • Identify and resolve workflow bottlenecks in development and deployment processes.
  • Create and maintain service templates and automation tools for consistent developer experiences.
  • Design and implement reusable CI pipelines that facilitate fast and secure deployments.
  • Enhance reliability of builds and tests, focusing on reducing flaky tests and cycle times.
  • Establish observability standards and practices to ensure production readiness of services.
  • Collaborate with product engineers to optimize reliability and operational effectiveness.
  • Take ownership of platform systems and ensure their health and performance in production environments.

Benefits

  • Unlimited vacation policy to promote work-life balance.
  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and family.
  • Life Insurance and Disability coverage for added security.
  • Retirement plan options, including a 401K.
  • Parental leave to support family growth.
  • Fertility and family-building assistance through Carrot.
  • Free daily lunches and snacks in the office for employee wellness.
Full Job Description
About the Team

The Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundations that power Decagon: networking, data, ML serving, developer platform, and real-time voice. We partner closely with product, data, and ML to deliver high-scale, low-latency systems with clear SLOs and great developer ergonomics.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build and evolve our internal developer platform-everything from CI/CD and release automation to observability standards, platform tooling, and developer workflows that remove friction.

This role is for someone who loves making other engineers faster: reducing build times, eliminating flaky tests, creating paved roads for service creation/deployment, and raising the bar on operability by default. Roles like this often combine "builder" energy with strong empathy for how engineers actually work.

What you'll do
  • Developer productivity & platform tooling
    • Identify workflow bottlenecks (build/test/release/local dev) and build tools that measurably reduce toil.
    • Create and maintain "golden paths" like service templates, CLIs, libraries, and automation that teams rely on.
  • CI/CD & release engineering
    • Design reusable CI pipelines and deployment workflows that are fast, safe, and easy to adopt across teams.
    • Improve reliability of builds and tests (flake reduction, hermeticity, caching) and drive down cycle time.
    • Support progressive delivery patterns (canary / blue-green) and safe rollback mechanisms.
  • Observability & operational excellence
    • Establish shared observability primitives (metrics/logs/traces), standards, and libraries so services are production-ready by default.
    • Partner with product engineers to improve operability: SLOs, alerting hygiene, dashboards, incident learnings.
  • Infrastructure foundations
    • Build and improve core platform capabilities that make it easy to run and scale services.
  • Ownership & reliability
    • Own the systems you build end-to-end and help keep them healthy in production, improving reliability over time.


Your background looks something like this
  • 4+ years building production software, with meaningful experience in platform / devtools / infrastructure (or adjacent SRE/release engineering).
  • Strong coding ability in at least one systems/productivity language (e.g., Python, TypeScript/JS), and comfort building developer-facing tooling (CLIs, libraries, automation).
  • Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and designing pipelines that are scalable and reusable across many repos/services.
  • Practical experience with observability in production systems (instrumentation, alerting, dashboards, incident response).
  • Comfort with containers and modern cloud infrastructure (e.g., Docker/Kubernetes and related tooling).
  • A track record of improving developer experience through measurable outcomes (faster builds, fewer flakes, safer deploys, fewer incidents).
  • Strong cross-team collaboration and communication-especially writing clear docs and driving adoption.


Even better if you have
  • Experience with monorepos and build systems and/or large-scale CI performance work.
  • Experience building internal platforms: service templates, paved-road deployment, self-serve environments, developer portals.
  • Infrastructure-as-code experience (e.g., Terraform) and a security-minded approach to supply chain (provenance, secrets, least privilege).
  • Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to make engineers dramatically more effective.


Compensation

$200K - $400K + Offers Equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact.

In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.

Benefits

We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:
  • Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)
  • Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
  • Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
  • Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
  • Parental Leave
  • Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
  • Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best

These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon's policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.

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