Senior Developer Experience Engineer

Justworks•New York, NY

13h•Hybrid

About The Position

At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people. We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you. We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team. Our Values If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in. You are a tooling-focused engineer who obsesses over developer productivity. You’ve built and maintained CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, and automation that makes engineering teams faster. You understand that the best developer tools disappear into the background - they just work. You’re equally comfortable debugging a flaky GitHub Actions workflow and designing a new internal CLI. You care deeply about reducing friction and cognitive load for your fellow engineers. This is a foundational role. You’ll be one of the first dedicated engineers on a platform organization supporting 300+ engineers. You’ll shape not just the technical foundations but the culture and practices of the team. As a Senior Developer Experience Engineer, how results are achieved is paramount for your success and ultimately results in our success as an organization. In this role, your foundational knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes are anchored in the following: Good judgment - the exercise of critical thinking, analyzing and assessing problems and implications, identifying patterns, making connections of underlying issues, understanding risks and developing mitigation strategies, and taking ownership of the outcome. Resourcefulness - taking a can-do approach, even in the face of obstacles and constraints by assessing what’s in front of you and effectively and efficiently optimizing what you have, whether it’s working on something new or thinking about how to do something better. Teamwork and communication - putting our collective best together through documentation, collaboration, relationship-building, listening, empathy, recruiting, and evangelism. Influence and leadership - fostering a community of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward-thinking. Skills and knowledge - the capacity to actively learn and apply specific domain knowledge, know-how, and best practices to continually enhance and improve. In addition, all team members focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS: Camaraderie - Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You’re an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others. Openness - Your default is to be open. You’re willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You’re curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others. Grit - You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You’re committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude. Integrity - Simply put, do what you say and say what you’ll do. You’re honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example. Simplicity - Be like Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience
3+ years of experience building developer tooling, CI/CD systems, or infrastructure automation
Hands-on experience with CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions strongly preferred)
Experience with developer portals or internal platform tooling (Backstage strongly preferred; Cortex, Port, or similar also valuable)
Experience with Kubernetes deployments and container orchestration
Proficiency in at least two programming languages; polyglot mindset valued
Frontend development skills - you’ll be building portal UI and developer-facing tools
Strong systems thinking and ability to design for scale and reliability
Excellent written communication - you document as you build

Nice To Haves

Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK, or similar)
Experience with feature management systems (LaunchDarkly, Split, etc.)
Familiarity with workflow engines (Temporal, etc.)
Background in developer productivity metrics and measurement
Experience configuring or rolling out AI coding assistants (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor)

Responsibilities

Own and evolve CI/CD infrastructure (GitHub Actions, deployment pipelines) to improve build times and deployment frequency
Build and maintain our developer portal (Backstage) - service catalog, golden path templates, and TechDocs integration
Create golden path templates for Go, Rails, and Vue.js services that bake in best practices automatically
Build and maintain internal developer tooling that accelerates engineering workflows
Configure and roll out AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) with organizational guardrails
Create self-service capabilities that enable teams to ship independently - from “I need a new service” to running in staging in under 4 hours
Drive adoption of platform capabilities through excellent documentation and developer education
Work with our SRE team to instrument and measure developer experience metrics (build times, deploy frequency, MTTR) to identify improvement opportunities
Implement security and compliance automation that protects without slowing teams down

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