Staff Backend Engineer, CI/CD

Fetch•Reston, VA

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

Platform engineering at Fetch is grounded in service to developers, strong ownership, and purposeful innovation. Rather than building end-user features, platform engineers focus on the foundations that other teams rely on, spanning core systems, architecture, automation, and developer workflows. This work lives in complex problem spaces where the right answer is rarely obvious. Our engineers navigate ambiguity with data and sound judgment, understand tradeoffs, and partner closely across product and engineering to solve problems that scale. We maintain a high technical bar and value practicality, curiosity, and continuous improvement. This is an environment for builders who enjoy shaping durable platforms, improving developer experience at scale, and enabling teams across Fetch to ship with confidence. About the Role: We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer focused on CI/CD Engineering to help evolve the systems, infrastructure, and developer workflows that power software delivery across Fetch. You will improve the tools and pipelines that power our releases. This includes surfacing meaningful feedback for developers, optimizing CI performance, improving testing and quality gates, and building automation that makes shipping code faster and safer. This is a generalist platform engineering role with a strong DevOps and infrastructure orientation. You will work across backend, mobile, frontend, platform, infrastructure, and developer tooling rather than specializing in a single application stack. At the Staff level, your impact will extend beyond implementing individual pipelines or tools. You will identify systemic bottlenecks across the software development lifecycle, establish technical direction, influence engineering standards, and lead multi-quarter initiatives that improve how hundreds of engineers build, test, and deploy software. You will partner closely with engineering teams to understand friction in their workflows and build scalable solutions that improve developer velocity while maintaining a high bar for reliability and quality. This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience building or operating CI/CD, developer infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or related systems.
Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership, including leading ambiguous initiatives that span multiple engineering teams.
A track record of growing other engineers through mentorship, technical guidance, or the standards and practices you have put in place.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to work across application and infrastructure boundaries.
Experience designing and operating modern CI/CD systems at meaningful scale.
Strong understanding of build systems, testing infrastructure, deployment strategies, artifact management, and release automation.
Experience with cloud infrastructure and modern DevOps practices.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated infrastructure provisioning.
Strong understanding of containers and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience diagnosing performance, scalability, and reliability problems across distributed build or deployment systems.
Strong understanding of software delivery tradeoffs including speed, cost, reliability, developer experience, and operational complexity.
Ability to write production-quality software and automation rather than relying exclusively on configuration or third-party tooling.
Strong communication skills with experience influencing technical direction across teams without direct authority.
High degree of ownership and agency. Comfortable navigating ambiguity, defining a path forward, and driving toward pragmatic and maintainable solutions.
A developer-focused mindset with a strong interest in understanding how engineers interact with the systems you build.
An AI-forward mentality and willingness to explore emerging tools that can meaningfully improve engineering effectiveness.

Nice To Haves

Experience building internal developer platforms or developer productivity tooling at medium-to-large engineering organizations.
Experience with CI platforms such as GitHub Actions, Bitrise or similar systems.
Experience with Kubernetes-based build or CI infrastructure.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
Experience with AWS or another major cloud provider.
Experience with observability systems and establishing SLOs for developer-facing infrastructure.
Experience designing progressive delivery systems, canary deployments, feature rollouts, or automated rollback mechanisms.
Experience improving large monorepo or multi-repository build systems.
Experience working across backend, frontend, mobile, and infrastructure environments.
Experience developing internal platforms or paved roads that abstract infrastructure complexity for application engineers.
Experience applying AI or autonomous agents to software development, testing, CI/CD, or operational workflows.
Open-source contributions or involvement in developer tooling, infrastructure, or DevOps communities.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for CI/CD systems and software delivery infrastructure across Fetch.
Own the CI/CD roadmap over multiple quarters, aligning investment with org priorities, cost tradeoffs, and engineering strategy, and making the case for where to invest and where not to.
Design, build, and evolve scalable CI pipelines, deployment systems, and developer automation.
Improve feedback loops by making build failures, test results, quality signals, and deployment health easier for developers to understand and act on.
Identify and eliminate bottlenecks across build, test, merge, deployment, and release workflows.
Improve CI performance through caching, parallelization, workload optimization, infrastructure improvements, and thoughtful test execution strategies.
Design quality gates and automated safeguards that allow teams to move quickly without compromising reliability.
Build tools and platform capabilities that standardize common software delivery patterns while allowing teams to move independently.
Partner with infrastructure, SRE, security, backend, frontend, and mobile engineers to improve the reliability and scalability of our software delivery systems.
Establish metrics and observability for CI/CD systems, including developer feedback time, pipeline reliability, infrastructure utilization, and deployment performance.
Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and introduce new technologies when they provide meaningful improvements over existing solutions.
Lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives from problem definition through adoption.
Drive adoption of new tools and workflows through documentation, technical guidance, training, and hands-on collaboration.
Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, and establish feedback loops, review standards, or coaching practices that raise the technical bar for platform, infrastructure, and developer productivity engineering across teams.
Explore how AI and agentic development workflows can improve build, test, review, deployment, and operational processes.