Software Engineer: Developer Experience Remote (US or EU timezones)

Meetkay; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

YakLabs is building a desktop AI platform where developers and agents collaborate to ship plugins and extensions. You’ll own the plugin SDK, the CLI, and the developer docs, ensuring fast local development, scalable builds, and reliable release tooling.

You’ll measure the developer loop and remove bottlenecks, treating plugin authors as customers at the platform level. The role emphasizes TypeScript/Node expertise and monorepo tooling to keep a large codebase fast and enjoyable for engineers

Qualifications

• Experience owning developer tooling that engineers rely on daily.
• Strong focus on developer experience, including error messages and docs.
• Built or contributed to monorepo tooling and tooling at scale.
• Deep TypeScript and Node expertise, with monorepo ecosystems.
• Preference for shipping tools that reduce manual steps.

Responsibilities

• Own the plugin SDK, the CLI, and the developer docs: scaffolding, local development, test harnesses, and publishing.
• Own the build: CI, caching, test infrastructure, and release tooling. Make it fast, and make its signal trustworthy.
• Build tooling that helps agents work well in our codebase: parallel worktrees, review gates, evals, and the instructions for success.
• Measure the developer loop, identify bottlenecks, and remove them.
• Treat developer experience as product, supporting plugin authors as customers at the platform level.

Skills

Developer tooling ownership

Build systems

SDK

CLI

CI at scale

TypeScript

Node.js

Monorepo tooling

Tools

pnpm

Turborepo

Plugin SDK

CLI tooling

CI pipelines

Job description

Engineering Remote (US or EU timezones) Full-time

YakLabs is building a desktop AI application that turns knowledge workers into AI power users, without docs, API keys, or knowing what to ask for. One surface for agentic AI work: proactive, personalized, progressively powerful. The gap between AI power users and everyone else isn’t talent, it’s setup. We close it.

The team: Alex Goddijn spent four years at Palantir, then founded an agent harness company that was acquired by Poolside AI. Seb Goddijn led internal AI at Ramp. We’re building Kay so that kind of leverage isn’t limited to companies with their own internal AI team.

We have funding. Product and design work in person in New York City, and some engineering roles are remote. Small team, high intensity, no passengers.

The job

You make building on Kay fast for everyone who does it: our own engineers, the agents that write a growing share of our code, forward deployed engineers building for customers, and outside developers writing plugins. Kay is a platform: dozens of plugins, a plugin SDK, a CLI, and an address space that agents operate through. How quickly someone gets from an idea to a working, reviewed, shipped extension decides how fast the product and its ecosystem grow. That loop is yours.

Problems you’ll work on

These are examples, not lanes. You will move between them, while taking real ownership of the ones that match your interests.

• Agents as developers: A growing share of our code is written by agents and reviewed by people. What do a repo, a CI system, and a review process look like when the author never gets tired and is sometimes confidently wrong? How do you make a green build mean something?
• A plugin platform people actually build on: Writing a plugin should take an afternoon, not a week of reading source. What SDK, scaffolding, local dev loop, and docs get a developer, or an agent, from zero to a working, well-behaved plugin, and how do you know it behaves before it ships?
• Fast feedback at monorepo scale: One TypeScript monorepo holds a desktop app, a daemon, cloud services, and dozens of plugins. How do you keep builds, tests, and type checks fast enough that nobody waits on them, including agents running in parallel worktrees, without letting coverage rot?
• Contracts that don’t drift: Our tools and plugin APIs are consumed by agents that read help text, not source. How do you keep contracts, docs, and behavior in sync so an agent’s first call is the right one?

What you’ll do

• Own the plugin SDK, the CLI, and the developer docs: scaffolding, local development, test harnesses, and publishing.
• Own the build: CI, caching, test infrastructure, and release tooling. Make it fast, and make its signal trustworthy.
• Build the tooling that lets agents work well in our codebase: parallel worktrees, review gates, evals, and the instructions and skills that tell an agent how we build.
• Measure the developer loop, find where the time goes, and remove it.
• Treat FDEs and plugin authors as your customers. Watch where they get stuck and fix it at the platform level, not with a workaround.

Who you are

• You’ve owned developer tooling that other engineers depended on every day: a build system, an SDK, a CLI, or CI at scale.
• You treat developer experience as product design. The first five minutes, the error messages, and the docs matter to you as much as the internals.
• You build with coding agents every day, and you have strong opinions about what makes a codebase easy or hard for them to work in.
• Deep TypeScript and Node. You’re at home in monorepo tooling (pnpm, Turborepo, or similar), and you know how to make a slow build fast.
• You’d rather delete a step than document it.

Bonus

• You’ve built a public SDK or extension API that outside developers adopted.
• You’ve built developer tools designed for agents to use, such as MCP servers or agent-friendly CLIs.
• You’ve shipped PRs to open-source agentic harness projects.

Who we look for

These apply to every role at YakLabs.

• First principles thinking. We’re building in a category that’s being defined in real time. Best practices don’t exist yet. You reason from the problem, not from what everyone else is doing.
• High agency and ownership. You don’t wait to be told what to do. You see what needs to happen, you go make it happen, and you own the outcome. At a team this size, there’s nobody to delegate to.
• Deep curiosity about AI tooling. Not just using ChatGPT or Copilot: you’re experimenting, writing your own tools, trying new agent frameworks the week they drop, forming opinions about what works and what doesn’t. The people building this product should be the most demanding users of the category.
• You build compounding leverage. In the era of building with agents, one person doesn’t just ship one person’s work, they build the systems that build the product. Every person is amplified, and with that amplification comes the responsibility to build things that compound: skills, automations, agent workflows that make the next thing faster. This is a new way of working, and you’re excited to develop the skillset it demands.

The deal

• Early team, meaningful equity.
• In person in New York City for product and design roles. Some engineering roles are remote, and each posting lists its location.
• You’ll shape the product, the culture, and the company. This is a founding-team role.

How we hire

YakLabs is an equal opportunity employer. We consider every application withoutregard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation,national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protectedcharacteristic. If you need an accommodation at any point in the process, email [e-mail] and we will work it out with you. A person, not a machine,reads every application.