Senior Backend Engineer - Developer Experience & Productivity

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer focused on Developer Productivity and Developer Experience to remove that bottleneck. This is a high-leverage, internal engineering role on our Platform Team: your users are Taktile’s backend and frontend engineers and the AI agents working alongside them, and your product is the path from first commit to production.

You’ll make CI fast and reliable, make our serverless stack easier to build on, and turn “how fast can we ship safely?” into metrics we move every quarter.

What you’ll do

• Build the deployment services that ship Taktile. Own the systems behind tens of thousands of stack deployments a week across dev, staging, production, and per-customer AWS accounts: progressive rollouts through monitoring and canary stages, deployment windows and gates, and fast rollbacks.
• Keep our AI developer tooling sharp. Maintain and extend Claudius, our in-house AI engineering agent that investigates CI failures, triages issues, and opens PRs, and metadev, our sandboxed Claude Code and OpenCode setup that packages Taktile’s engineering knowledge for every engineer.
• Own the build test merge loop. Drive down CI runtime and flakiness across our main monorepos. Find the slowest and least reliable steps, fix them, and keep them fixed.
• Evolve our CI/CD architecture. Build on our move to per-module GitHub Actions workflows and a self-hosted runner fleet. Improve caching, parallelism, and cost per build.
• Shorten the inner dev loop. Make developing on our AWS Lambda stack fast, from running services locally against preview environments to faster, container-based deploys, so engineers aren’t waiting on CloudFormation to test a change.
• Build paved roads. Ship templates, CLIs, and self-service tooling so any team can take a new module from first commit to a running dev workspace in under a day.
• Design for humans and agents. Make our tooling fast, deterministic, and scriptable so engineers and AI coding agents get quick, trustworthy feedback.
• Measure what matters. Own DevProd metrics like PR lead time, CI runtime, CI flakiness, and PRs per engineer-day. Use them to decide what to fix next and to prove the impact of what you ship.
• Own our AI developer tooling. Take ownership of Claudius, our in-house AI engineering agent, and decide where it goes next.
• Treat engineers as customers. Talk to teams, triage CI incidents, write clear docs, and drive migrations and deprecations to completion.

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems end-to-end and leading technical projects across teams.
• Strong, production-grade skills in at least one backend language. Python is our main language today, but we’re open to others. This role is mostly writing software (tools, services, bots, and CI logic), not only configuring it.
• Hands-on experience owning CI/CD at scale (for example, GitHub Actions): build and test performance, caching, parallelization, and debugging flaky tests and pipelines.
• Solid AWS experience, ideally with serverless (Lambda, CloudFormation/SAM) and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Comfortable with the latest AI coding and agent-orchestration tools (for example, Claude Code, OpenCode, subagents, and MCP). You use them daily and know how to make them work reliably for a whole engineering org.
• A product mindset for internal tooling. You talk to your users, measure outcomes, and judge success by adoption and time saved.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management. You can drive a change across many teams you don’t manage: write the proposal, plan the rollout, and see it through.

Ideal, but not required

• Prior experience on a developer productivity, developer experience, build/release engineering, or platform team.
• Experience as a product-facing backend engineer, so you know firsthand where the development loop hurts.
• Experience with frontend build and test tooling in the TypeScript/React ecosystem, so you can support our frontend engineers too.
• Experience running self-hosted CI runners or build infrastructure at scale.
• Experience with progressive delivery: canary deployments, automated rollbacks, and deployment gates.
• Experience with monorepo tooling, build systems, or dependency management at scale.
• Experience building AI agents or agent infrastructure, such as MCP servers, agent harnesses, or evals.

Our Stack

• AI: Claude, Claude Code, OpenCode
• Programming Languages: Python and TypeScript (React) today; open to others where they fit better
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, SAM/CloudFormation, ECR, CodeDeploy), Docker, Terraform
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, self-hosted runners
• Internal Tools: GitHub, Linear, Notion, Metabase

• We’re eager to meet talented and driven candidates regardless of whether they tick all the boxes. We’re looking for someone who will add to our culture, not just fit within it. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underestimated and underrepresented in tech to apply.
• We seek to actively recognize and combat racism, sexism, ableism and ageism. We embrace and support all gender identities and expressions, and celebrate love in its many forms. We won’t inquire about how you identify or if you’ve experienced discrimination, but if you want to tell your story, we are all ears.