Jobs · Engineering · California

Staff Product Engineer, Developer Experience

Nscale · San Francisco, CA · 1 wk ago
HybridEngineering$220k/yrFull-time

About the Role

We’re seeking a Staff Product Engineer to define the paved roads developers use to adopt, operate, and scale on Nscale, from first API call to production workloads. This is a high-impact IC role for someone who operates beyond a single squad: setting technical direction, owning multi-quarter roadmaps, and driving cross-team delivery for developer-facing products and paved roads. You’ll work end-to-end across discovery, design, build, and iteration, partnering closely with Product, Design, Platform, SRE, and Security, to ship developer experiences that are measurable improvements in speed, reliability, and trust.

Scope & Impact

  • Owns strategy and outcomes for a DevEx domain (e.g., onboarding & activation, API/SDK experience, Console/Fleet Manager foundations, IaC workflows, or internal developer tooling).
  • Influences multiple teams by establishing standards, reusable components, and clear paved roads.
  • Leads cross-team technical programs from strategy through delivery; navigates ambiguity and makes high-leverage trade-offs.
  • Raises the quality bar through instrumentation, reliability discipline, and operational ownership.

Responsibilities

  • Set direction and roadmap: define a multi-quarter strategy for a DevEx domain, including sequencing, milestones, and success metrics.
  • Lead cross-team delivery: drive execution across teams and repos; align dependencies, unblock delivery, and ensure high-quality outcomes.
  • Build and evolve core DevEx surfaces and foundations:
    • Console/Fleet Manager experiences and shared UI foundations
    • Developer tooling (CLIs, generators, templates, local dev workflows)
    • API/SDK experience (ergonomics, versioning, examples, docs)
    • Terraform/IaC workflows and operational patterns
    • Documentation and onboarding flows that reduce time-to-first-success
  • Instrument and iterate: define KPIs (activation/time-to-first-success, adoption funnels, reliability, latency, satisfaction), implement telemetry, and build feedback loops.
  • Establish durable quality gates: pragmatic testing strategy, performance budgets, accessibility standards, observability, and safe release patterns (feature flags, canaries/rollbacks).
  • Drive platform coherency: standardize patterns and shared components so product squads integrate cleanly without central gatekeeping.
  • Security and governance: ensure RBAC/IAM, PII handling, auditability, and safe defaults are built into developer workflows.
  • Mentor and multiply: coach senior engineers, raise engineering standards via design reviews and patterns, and help teams adopt DevEx paved roads.

Requirements

  • Significant experience shipping developer-facing products or platforms (tooling, portals, APIs/SDKs, docs, dashboards) with strong product sense and engineering fundamentals.
  • The tech you’ll be using includes Go, TypeScript / React, OpenAPI, CLIs, SDKs, Terraform providers, telemetry, and automation.
  • Proficiency in Go, or clear evidence you can ramp quickly in Go-based developer tooling.
  • Proven ability to operate at Staff scope: leading ambiguous cross-team work through strategy, architecture, and delivery.
  • Strong full-stack capability across TypeScript / React, Go-based tooling, telemetry, and automation.
  • Experience with OpenAPI-driven or contract-first development.
  • Track record of operational ownership: reliability, performance, and safe incremental delivery in production.
  • Strong written communication: can write specs and RFCs that translate into systems that are built, tested, and maintained.
  • Practical experience using AI as a force multiplier in workflow and/or product, with attention to cost/latency and reliability.

Preferred Experience

  • Shipping CLIs, SDKs, Terraform providers/modules, or other tools developers automate against.
  • Release engineering for developer tools, including semantic versioning, deprecation policy, signed releases, package registries, or compatibility guarantees.
  • Scaling a design system or shared UI foundations across multiple product teams.
  • Building AI-assisted developer features with strong evaluation and observability.
  • Cloud/platform products and operator workflows (auditing, IAM, reliability/observability).

What Success Looks Like

  • A key developer journey measurably improves (activation, time-to-first-success, reliability, or satisfaction) and the improvements sustain over time.
  • Multiple teams adopt shared DevEx paved roads and standards, reducing bespoke solutions and integration friction.
  • Delivery speed increases without sacrificing quality, backed by stable metrics and reliable release signals.

Pay

Salary Range: $220,000 USD - $266,667 USD. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • Flexible paid time off
  • Parental leave
  • Retirement plan participation

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