Senior Developer Experience Engineer

Who We Are

At Justworks, youll 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.

Were helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. Were data-driven and never stop iterating. If youd like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, wed love to hear from you.

Were 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, youll fit right in.

Department: Platform Engineering

Who You Are

You are a tooling-focused engineer who obsesses over developer productivity. Youve 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. Youre 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. Youll be one of the first dedicated engineers on a platform organization supporting 300+ engineers. Youll shape not just the technical foundations but the culture and practices of the team.

Your Success Profile

What You Will Work On

• 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

How You Will Do Your Work

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 whats in front of you and effectively and efficiently optimizing what you have, whether its 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. Youre an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others.
• Openness - Your default is to be open. Youre willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. Youre 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. Youre 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 youll do. Youre 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."

Qualifications

• 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 - youll 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 Have

• 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)

Technologies

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, CircleCI
• Infrastructure: Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker
• Languages: Go (primary), Python, TypeScript, Ruby - whatever fits the problem
• Platforms: Developer portals, feature flagging systems, workflow engines
• Observability: DataDog, CloudWatch

The base wage range for this position based in our New York City Office is targeted at $167,500.00 - $211,500.00 per year.

#LI-DG2 #LI-Hybrid

Actual compensation is based on multiple factors that are unique to each candidate, including and not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and specific work location. Salary ranges for positions based in other locations may differ based on the cost of labor in that location.

For more information about Justworks Total Reward Philosophy, including all of the perks and benefits we are proud to offer our team members, please visit Total Rewards @ Justworks.

Diversity At Justworks

Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. Diversity in our work, our people, and our product drives creativity and innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and integrity, competitiveness, and collaboration throughout our business and in the market. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all of our customers.

Were proud to be an equal opportunity employer open to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or familial status, disability, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Justworks is fully dedicated to providing necessary support to candidates with disabilities who may require reasonable accommodations. We also provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on their sincerely held religious beliefs, as well as for other covered reasons consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. If youre in need of a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at accommodations@justworks.com. Your comfort and success matter to us, and were here to ensure an inclusive experience.

Our DEIB Report