Senior/Staff Developer Experience Engineer

The role

This person will define the architecture and roadmap for developer tooling, CI/CD, build systems, and release workflows. They will lead initiatives to standardize the path from code change to production and build reusable developer paths.

What you will do

• Define the architecture and roadmap for local development, repository tooling, CI/CD, build systems, and release workflows.
• Lead high-impact initiatives that reduce manual coordination and standardize the path from code change to production.
• Build reusable GitLab CI/CD templates, runner capabilities, developer workflows, test gates, artifact promotion, release manifests, and rollback paths.
• Establish sustainable practices for shared container images, build performance, reproducibility, scanning, signing, provenance, and supply-chain security.
• Improve developer workflow and delivery observability through measures of setup time, pipeline health, release performance, and adoption.
• Partner with Platform, Security, QA, and feature teams to make delivery foundations reliable, secure, and easy to consume.
• Establish standards and paved paths for developer workflows, build and release engineering, and approved AI-assisted development.
• Design safe agentic-development workflows that integrate with code review, testing, scanning, permissions, auditability, and Security requirements.
• Turn repeated developer friction into reusable tooling, templates, documentation, migration guidance, and runbooks.
• Mentor engineers, develop technical owners, and raise the engineering bar.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Developer Experience, Developer Productivity, Build/Release Engineering, Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial tooling and delivery owne
• Deep experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, preferably GitLab CI/CD and self-hosted runners.
• Experience with container builds, Docker or OCI images, artifact repositories, and reproducible builds.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes-based development or delivery workflows.
• Experience implementing automated tests, security checks, release gates, progressive delivery, and rollback.
• Proficiency in Go and Python for automation, developer tooling, or platform services.
• Strong understanding of software supply-chain security, dependencies, image vulnerabilities, provenance, secrets, and least privilege.
• Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams and driving adoption of shared capabilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority.

Nice to have

• Internal developer platform, paved-road, service-template, or developer-portal experience.
• Shared language/runtime base images, image signing, SBOMs, or provenance-control experience.
• GitLab Runner fleets, CI optimization, build caching, or multi-repository release-system experience.
• Local Kubernetes, dev containers, Docker Compose, Orbstack, Skaffold, ArgoCD, or GitOps experience.
• AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflow experience.
• OpenTelemetry, Datadog, pipeline telemetry, or developer-productivity metrics experience.
• Security-sensitive, regulated, or cybersecurity experience.

Benefits

• health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family
• flexible vacation policy
• generous parental leave
• equity package in the form of stock options

About the company

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find and fix and verify exploitable attack vectors. The team is a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners.