Developer Experience Engineer - AI Infrastructure Operations

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Developer Experience Engineer

Houston; San Francisco; Seattle; New York

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud built for AI.  We run high-performance, cost-efficient infrastructure for AI-native startups and global enterprises, from bare metal up through the platform services teams actually build on.  Our culture runs on ownership, accountability, and speed.  We move with urgency, we tell each other the truth, and everyone here stays close to the infrastructure that makes AI work.

The Role

This is a career-level engineering role for someone who wants to own the path from commit to production.  You'll take real surface area: the CI/CD, GitOps, and change automation that Nscale's engineers use every day to ship.  Internal developers are your customers, and you'll be expected to make their route to production faster, safer, and less manual over time.

What You'll Do

• Build and own the tooling that carries code from pull request to production, including GitHub Actions workflows, runners, and Argo CD and Flux deployment pipelines.
• Own the build and release layer: build tooling, remote caching, container image builds, base images, the artifact registry, and release versioning and promotion, so builds are fast, reproducible, and cheap to run.
• Own local and ephemeral test environments, including LocalStack, so engineers can test against cloud APIs on a laptop or in CI before anything reaches a shared environment.
• Automate change management: connect git, CI, and deploy events to Jira Service Management so change records, risk tiers, and approvals are created and updated without manual ticket work.
• Define and maintain SLOs, SLIs, and dashboards for the delivery platform (CI queue time, build duration, deploy success rate, rollback time, GitOps sync latency) so developers can see its health at a glance.
• Treat developer toil as a bug.  Find the slow, manual, or error-prone steps between a merge and a running service, and remove them with code.
• Keep the delivery platform reliable: troubleshoot pipeline and deployment failures under pressure, drive root cause analysis, and run post-incident reviews that change the system.
• Maintain the standards that keep repositories consistent and safe: branch protection, CODEOWNERS, reusable workflows, secrets handling, and repo templates.
• Run the internal developer portal (Backstage or equivalent): the service catalog, software templates, and docs that let engineers find owners, scaffold a new service, and deploy it without filing a ticket.
• Partner with Engineering, SRE, Security, and Infrastructure teams.  Onboard teams to the paved road, write the docs, and act on their feedback.

What You'll Bring

• 3-6 years in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or software engineering, including time building CI/CD or deployment tooling that other engineers relied on.
• Strong programming skills (Python, Go, or similar) and a bias toward automating the work away.
• Hands-on experience with GitHub (Actions and organization administration) and at least one GitOps tool, Argo CD or Flux.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containers.
• Hands-on experience with a build and release system (CI build tooling, versioned releases, and promotion between environments), container image builds (BuildKit, Kaniko, or similar), and an artifact registry such as Artifactory.
• Experience with an internal developer portal or service catalog (Backstage or similar), or the willingness to learn one quickly.
• Enough Linux and networking fundamentals to debug runners, build hosts, and cluster problems without handing them off.
• Fluency with monitoring and observability: metrics, logs, dashboards, and alerting.
• A track record of troubleshooting live production issues and owning the fix through to the retro.
• The habit of treating developers as customers: you ask what is slowing them down before you build anything, and you measure whether the fix helped.
• Comfort in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift and you fill gaps without waiting to be asked.

Nice to Have

• Jira Service Management or Jira workflow and API automation, or experience with ITIL-style change processes.
• Experience with progressive delivery or workflow tooling (Argo Rollouts, Argo Workflows), or with running more than one GitOps tool in the same environment.
• Vault, OIDC federation for CI, and software supply chain practices such as SBOMs and image signing.
• Terraform and policy as code (OPA or Kyverno).
• Local cloud emulation (LocalStack or similar) and ephemeral or preview environments.
• Familiarity with GPU, AI, or bare-metal infrastructure, so you understand what the people you are building for deploy.

On-Call and Pace

A quick note on the shape of the job.  This role supports the systems engineers use to ship, so there is an on-call rotation for the delivery platform, and some weeks are busier than others.  A broken pipeline in the middle of a production fix is a real problem, so we treat every page as a signal worth acting on rather than just an interruption.  We share the load fairly.  The goal is to make the platform quieter over time, so each rotation asks less of the person carrying it.

What We Offer

• Competitive base plus equity, reviewed every 12 months.
• Real scope early, and a progression plan built around the skills you want to sharpen.
• Flexibility that treats you as an adult; we care that the work gets done, and we trust you to shape your day.

Salary Range

$100,000 - $170,000 USD.  Actual compensation varies with skill set, experience, and location, and the role may be eligible for bonus and equity.

Equal opportunities statement and candidate privacy notice carried over from the current posting.