Staff Developer Experience Engineer
About The Position
Horizon3 is seeking a Staff Developer Experience Engineer to play a crucial role in shaping how their engineers build, test, release, and operate software. The Developer Experience team is responsible for the foundational elements that connect local development to production delivery, including developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, build systems, container base images, artifact promotion, release gates, and approved agentic-development workflows. This role involves defining technical direction, leading complex initiatives across the engineering department, and building reusable solutions to enhance delivery speed, quality, security, and confidence. It is a hands-on technical leadership position for an engineer who thrives on solving ambiguous problems, influencing cross-functional teams, and simplifying the software lifecycle.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in Developer Experience, Developer Productivity, Build/Release Engineering, Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial tooling and delivery ownership.
- Deep experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, preferably GitLab CI/CD and self-hosted runners.
- Experience with container builds, Docker or OCI images, artifact repositories, and reproducible builds.
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes-based development or delivery workflows.
- Experience implementing automated tests, security checks, release gates, progressive delivery, and rollback.
- Proficiency in Go and Python for automation, developer tooling, or platform services.
- Strong understanding of software supply-chain security, dependencies, image vulnerabilities, provenance, secrets, and least privilege.
- Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams and driving adoption of shared capabilities.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority.
Nice To Haves
- Internal developer platform, paved-road, service-template, or developer-portal experience.
- Shared language/runtime base images, image signing, SBOMs, or provenance-control experience.
- GitLab Runner fleets, CI optimization, build caching, or multi-repository release-system experience.
- Local Kubernetes, dev containers, Docker Compose, Orbstack, Skaffold, ArgoCD, or GitOps experience.
- AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflow experience.
- OpenTelemetry, Datadog, pipeline telemetry, or developer-productivity metrics experience.
- Security-sensitive, regulated, or cybersecurity experience.
Responsibilities
- Define the architecture and roadmap for local development, repository tooling, CI/CD, build systems, and release workflows.
- Lead high-impact initiatives across engineering that reduce manual coordination and standardize the path from code change to production.
- Build reusable GitLab CI/CD templates, runner capabilities, developer workflows, test gates, artifact promotion, release manifests, and rollback paths.
- Establish sustainable practices for shared container images, build performance, reproducibility, scanning, signing, provenance, and supply-chain security.
- Improve developer workflow and delivery observability through useful measures of setup time, pipeline health, release performance, and adoption.
- Partner with Platform, Security, QA, and feature teams to make delivery foundations reliable, secure, and easy to consume.
- Establish standards and paved paths for developer workflows, build and release engineering, and approved AI-assisted development.
- Design safe agentic-development workflows that integrate with code review, testing, scanning, permissions, auditability, and Security requirements.
- Turn repeated developer friction into reusable tooling, templates, documentation, migration guidance, and runbooks.
- Mentor engineers, develop technical owners, and raise the engineering bar across Developer Experience and Horizon3.
- Communicate complex technical decisions clearly and build alignment across Platform, Application Engineering, Data Engineering, Security, QA, Product, and Program Management.
- Participate in design reviews, operational reviews, incident response, and continuous improvement.
Benefits
- health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family
- a flexible vacation policy
- generous parental leave
- equity package in the form of stock options
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
