Senior Developer Experience Engineer

About Justworks

Justworks fosters a friendly and informal work atmosphere enriched with excellent benefits, wellness initiatives, company retreats, and interaction opportunities with startup leaders. Our focus is helping businesses thrive by managing HR challenges through data-driven continuous improvement. If you're passionate about supporting startups and value a collaborative environment where you can both impact and enjoy your work, you'll feel at home here.

Role Summary

As a Senior Developer Experience Engineer, you will focus on improving the productivity of engineering teams by developing and maintaining seamless developer tools and automation. Your work will involve ownership of CI/CD infrastructure, developer portals, and tooling that smooth out engineering workflows. This pivotal position supports over 300 engineers, shaping both the technical infrastructure and the team's culture and practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage and enhance CI/CD systems (primarily GitHub Actions) to optimize build speed and deployment frequency.
• Develop and maintain the developer portal (Backstage) including service catalogs, standardized templates, and TechDocs integration.
• Create automated best practice templates for Go, Rails, and Vue.js projects.
• Build internal tools to accelerate engineering workflows.
• Deploy AI-assisted coding tools (such as Claude Code and GitHub Copilot) with appropriate organizational controls.
• Enable self-service capabilities for teams to rapidly deploy new services independently.
• Lead adoption of platform tools through clear documentation and developer education.
• Collaborate with the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to monitor metrics like build times, deployment frequency, and MTTR to drive improvements.
• Implement security and compliance automation that protects teams without impeding their speed.

Work Style and Culture

This role requires excellent judgment, resourcefulness, teamwork, strong communication, leadership, and a commitment to learning and applying domain expertise. You will align with Justworks' COGIS values: Camaraderie, Openness, Grit, Integrity, and Simplicity, fostering a respectful, collaborative, resilient, and straightforward workplace.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
• At least 3 years designing and managing developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or infrastructure automation.
• Proficiency with CI/CD platforms, especially GitHub Actions.
• Experience with developer portals or internal platform tooling such as Backstage.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes deployments and container orchestration.
• Fluency in at least two programming languages with a polyglot approach.
• Frontend development capabilities to build portal UIs and developer-facing tools.
• Strong systems thinking for scalable and reliable designs.
• Excellent written communication skills for thorough documentation.

Preferred Experience

• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform or CDK.
• Use of feature management systems such as LaunchDarkly or Split.
• Experience with workflow engines (e.g., Temporal).
• Background in developer productivity metrics and analysis.
• Implementing AI coding assistants including Copilot, Claude Code, or Cursor.

Technological Ecosystem

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

Compensation

• Toronto, Canada base salary range: 167000 to 215000 CAD per year.

Diversity & Inclusion

Justworks is dedicated to fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace where all identities and experiences are valued and supported. We provide accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities and respect religious beliefs, ensuring a welcoming environment where every individual can thrive.