Senior DevTools Engineer — AI-Driven Developer Experience

Socket.dev

San Diego (CA)

On-site

USD 140,000 - 180,000

Full time

5 days ago

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Job summary

Shield AI in San Diego, CA seeks a Senior or Staff Software Engineer to join the Developer Experience Engineering team. You will design, build, and operate tools and platforms that improve the end-to-end developer experience and accelerate productivity.

Bring agentic AI capabilities into developer tools, collaborate with engineering teams, use DORA metrics, and drive adoption through documentation and advocacy. This is a hands-on role with broad impact at Shield AI.

Qualifications

4+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience.
Demonstrated technical judgment in the design and operation of developer tools, platforms, backend services, APIs, distributed systems, or related production software.
Experience owning software from initial design through deployment, operation, adoption, and continuous improvement.
Systems thinking and the ability to turn recurring or ambiguous developer needs into coherent, reusable solutions.
Strong customer orientation toward internal developers and an interest in understanding and improving how engineering work gets done.
Effective collaboration and communication across engineering teams and organizational stakeholders.
Ability to advocate for new tools and practices, incorporate feedback, and build adoption through influence.
Experience with AWS and cloud-native development practices.
Experience with Git, GitLab, Backstage, or similar developer-platform technologies.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate tools and platforms that improve the end-to-end Hivemind developer experience.
Advance local development workflows, devcontainers, internal developer platforms, project templates, and other reusable engineering capabilities.
Bring agentic AI capabilities into developer tools and workflows, evaluating opportunities and turning promising ideas into reliable, practical solutions.
Partner with engineering teams to understand developer needs, identify recurring friction, and create paved paths that improve productivity without limiting appropriate flexibility.
Enable co-development and inner-source collaboration through accessible tooling, documentation, standards, and contribution practices.
Drive adoption of developer tools by working closely with engineers, gathering feedback, providing guidance, and clearly communicating their value.
Own solutions through discovery, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.
Use DORA metrics, developer feedback, adoption data, and other signals to understand outcomes and guide investment.
Contribute to technical direction through design reviews, architectural decisions, thoughtful tradeoffs, and collaboration across engineering teams.
At the Staff level, lead cross-team initiatives, establish longer-term technical direction, and influence how Hivemind approaches developer productivity at organizational scale.