Staff Product Engineer, Developer Experience

Ancestry • Draper, UT

10d

About The Position

Ancestry’s Engineering Productivity team owns the systems and tools used to build and ship software, including its CI/CD platform and tools such as GitHub, Harness, Jira, Confluence, and Figma. The team also builds internal platforms and services for cost governance, developer metadata, entity APIs, and CLI tooling that brings AI agents into engineering workflows. Its customers are Ancestry’s engineers, product managers, and designers, and adoption must be earned through useful products.

This is a product role that ships code. The engineer owns a developer workflow, tool, or user problem from discovery through adoption, combining product management, design, and engineering within an agreed scope. The work includes zero-to-one product development and applied AI. Solutions may include automation, product interfaces, agents, or deciding that no new tool is needed. The engineer is expected to design and build high-quality internal software to a consumer-grade standard, and to determine whether the work has helped through instrumentation and adoption results.

The role’s technical scope may include TypeScript and React interfaces, backend services and APIs, CLIs and terminal UIs, GitHub Apps and Actions, Harness pipeline templates, and Atlassian and Figma integrations. AI work may include agent workflows, context and tool design, and MCP servers, with evaluations, human review, cost and latency budgets, and guardrails. Ancestry offers a collaborative workplace, competitive compensation, and the opportunity to shape tools used across the company. Relocation assistance may be available to candidates open to moving to Draper, Utah.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, excluding internships.
• A track record of shipping software that people chose to use.
• Experience leading a complex project from unclear requirements through launch, coordinating across teams and making sound scope and implementation tradeoffs.
• Strength in at least one relevant engineering area, such as TypeScript and React or a backend language such as Go, Python, Java, or Rust, and ability to work effectively across adjacent layers.
• Experience building developer-facing software such as CLIs, internal platforms, SDKs, CI/CD tooling, or IDE integrations, and ability to explain what made it useful.
• Ability to seek user input, reason about interactions and failure states, and communicate clearly through specifications, documentation, changelogs, and launch notes.
• Ability to reason about where LLM-based capabilities can help, including failure modes and appropriate human review.
• Initiative in speaking with users and distinguishing what people request from what they need.
• Clear writing; specifications, documentation, changelogs, and launch notes are considered deliverables.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to add structure.

Nice To Haves

• Production AI experience; it is welcome but not required.
• Experience with Harness, GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar CI/CD systems, including release orchestration at scale.
• Experience automating against Jira, Confluence, GitHub, or Figma APIs, or building apps inside those products.
• Experience with agent frameworks, MCP servers, retrieval, or evaluation systems in production.
• Experience measuring developer productivity with DORA, SPACE, or DevEx-style methods, and good judgment about potential misuse of those measurements.
• Experience with terminal UI frameworks such as Bubble Tea or Textual, design systems, or internal developer portals such as Backstage.

Responsibilities

• Own a developer workflow, tool, or user problem through discovery, definition, design, development, rollout, adoption, and decisions to maintain, change, or retire it.
• Interview engineers, product managers, and designers; observe their work; and review support tickets, usage data, and CI logs to identify problems worth solving.
• Frame problems, define intended users and outcomes, set scope, and sequence small, useful releases; take larger bets or ownership-expanding work through team planning.
• Design user experiences before writing production code, including flows, states, empty states, and error cases; prototype in Figma or code.
• Build solutions across relevant interfaces, backend services, APIs, CLIs, terminal UIs, GitHub Apps and Actions, Harness pipeline templates, and Atlassian and Figma integrations.
• Apply AI to workflows where it is useful, including agent workflows, context and tool design, and MCP servers; establish evaluations, human review points, cost and latency budgets, and guardrails.
• Maintain a high quality bar for internal software, including perceived latency, responsiveness, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, clear error messages, and accurate documentation.
• Define success outcomes, instrument adoption, publish findings, and use results to guide subsequent work.
• Earn adoption by working with design partners, piloting with teams, communicating launches, holding office hours, and making migration paths clear.
• Make technical decisions within the area owned and turn effective approaches into reusable patterns for teammates.
• Coordinate with other teams while leading complex projects and make sound scope and implementation tradeoffs.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Bonus eligibility
• Equity
• Health benefits
• Dental benefits
• Vision benefits
• Relocation assistance may be available for candidates open to moving to Draper, Utah.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed