Software Engineer - Platform & Productivity

WorkOS; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k matching

Competitive Equity

Healthcare, dental and vision coverage

FSA, ST/LT Disability, Voluntary Life

Carrot fertility benefits

Vacation, holidays, sick leave

Parental leave (12 weeks)

Fitness stipend

Wellness stipend

Commuter benefits

Job summary

WorkOS seeks a Platform Engineer to join the Platform team, building shared backend components and development systems used across products. You’ll work on high-throughput services, CI/CD tooling, and reliable, scalable infrastructure to enable teams to ship faster with confidence.

You’ll rotate with product teams to understand workflows, shape platform investments, and implement scalable primitives. Strong communication and experience with distributed systems are essential.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience; proven ownership of high-impact projects.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems or platform services at scale.
• Experience building/operating CI/CD, build systems, or developer tooling.
• Track record of designing platforms and tooling with a clean developer experience.
• Strong operational instincts across observability, capacity planning, and reliability.
• Hands-on with AI coding agents or interest in agentic CI/CD systems and verifiable environments.
• Pragmatic, evidence-based decision making on build/buy/improve.
• Ability to balance long-term architecture with hands-on implementation.
• Strong written and verbal communication; documenting systems and influencing direction.
• Familiarity with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Postgres, AWS, Terraform, SQS/Kinesis (helpful).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency backend systems with consistency.
• Create platform interfaces and paved paths with a clean developer experience.
• Rotate across product teams to understand friction and inform platform investments.
• Map evolving product needs and introduce new systems and primitives like scalable search and archival strategies.
• Own and evolve CI/CD, build, test, deployment, and release infrastructure.
• Reimagine CI/CD for agentic software with isolated, reproducible execution environments.
• Instrument the lifecycle with metrics to identify bottlenecks and improve outcomes.
• Own platform reliability end-to-end including observability and incident response.
• Shape long-term platform strategy; evaluate vendors and balance build-vs-buy decisions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Platform services

Event-driven

CI/CD tooling

Observability

Developer tooling

AI agents

Architecture

Cross-team collaboration

Communication skills

Tools

Terraform

AWS

Postgres

SQS

Kinesis

Node.js

React

Job description

About WorkOS

WorkOS builds modern developer tools and APIs that make it easy for companies to become Enterprise Ready. Our platform powers authentication, identity, authorization, and other critical infrastructure that developers need to securely scale their products to large organizations.

We recently raised a $100M Series C, valuing the company at $2B, led by Meritech and Sapphire with participation from Greenoaks, Craft, Abstract, and Audacious. WorkOS powers enterprise features for many of the fastest-growing AI companies, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Perplexity, Sierra, and Plaid.

As AI reshapes software, WorkOS is at the frontier of Human and Agent Authentication, Identity, and Access Control helping companies answer a new critical question: who are your agents, and what are they allowed to do? Our fast-growing customer base includes hundreds of modern software companies building the next generation of enterprise-ready products.

About the role

The Platform team builds the shared backend components and development systems that every WorkOS product, workflow, and team member depends on.

On the platform side, we build common backend capabilities used across WorkOS, including our events infrastructure, webhooks, email delivery, outbox-pattern queues, and more. These systems allow product teams to scale without rebuilding the same critical primitives. Because they sit on critical paths across our products, scalability, latency, consistency, reliability, and operational simplicity matter deeply.

On the productivity side, we build the systems that take code from an idea to production, including CI/CD, build and test infrastructure, deployment workflows, and internal tooling. As agents play a larger role in software development and increase the volume of code and concurrent changes, we are rethinking this platform to scale with that volume through safe execution, fast feedback, relevant context, and verifiable outcomes.

Our internal teams are our customers. Success means they can build and operate products faster, adopt shared capabilities instead of creating one-off solutions, and confidently delegate more work to agents.

What you’ll work on

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency shared backend systems that preserve consistency and durability through retries, duplicates, reordering, partial failures, and high concurrency


• Create platform interfaces, abstractions, and paved paths with a clean developer experience that makes shared capabilities easy for product teams to adopt


• Rotate across and embed with product teams to experience their workflows directly, understand their friction, and use those insights to shape platform investments


• Map evolving product-team needs and collaborate with the Foundations team to introduce new systems and primitives, such as scalable search, database partitioning, and archival strategies


• Own and evolve our CI/CD, build, test, deployment, and release infrastructure to shorten feedback loops and make production changes safer


• Reimagine CI/CD for an agentic software development lifecycle by building isolated, reproducible, and verifiable execution environments, along with automated loops that allow agents to diagnose failures, update changes, rerun validation, and safely move work through review, deployment, and production verification


• Instrument the entire software development lifecycle and use metrics such as feedback time, CI reliability, deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate to identify bottlenecks and verify that platform investments improve engineering outcomes


• Own platform reliability end to end, including observability, capacity planning, incident response, root-cause analysis, and prevention


• Shape the long-term platform strategy with a high bar for introducing new infrastructure. Thoroughly evaluate vendors and existing solutions, make deliberate build-versus-buy decisions, and account for operational complexity, lock-in, migration cost, reversibility, and long-term ownership

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years of software development experience, with a track record of owning high-impact technical projects


• Experience building and operating distributed systems or platform services at scale, with a strong understanding of event-driven systems, queues, concurrency, idempotency, consistency, backpressure, retries, and failure recovery


• Experience building or operating CI/CD, build systems, test infrastructure, deployment platforms, or similar developer tooling


• A track record of designing platforms, frameworks, and tooling with a clean developer experience that makes complex capabilities easy for other engineers to adopt and operate


• Strong operational instincts across observability, capacity planning, incident response, and reliability


• Hands‑on experience with AI coding agents, or a strong interest in building agentic CI/CD systems, verifiable execution environments, automated feedback loops, evaluations, and verification


• Exceptional pragmatism and technical judgment. You treat major infrastructure changes with the gravity they deserve and make deliberate, evidence-based decisions about when to build, buy, or improve an existing system


• Ability to move between long-term architecture and hands‑on implementation while making thoughtful tradeoffs in an ambiguous environment


• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience documenting systems and influencing technical direction across teams


• Familiarity with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Postgres, AWS, Terraform, and queueing or streaming systems such as SQS and Kinesis is helpful, but not required

We expect strong depth in either distributed platform systems or developer infrastructure, along with an interest in working across both.

Benefits and Perks (US Only)

At WorkOS, we offer resources that emphasize personal and familial well-being. We offer healthcare coverage for you and your family, including medical, dental, and vision. We offer parental leave, paid‑time off and fully remote working arrangements.

• 401k matching


• Competitive Equity


• Healthcare, dental and vision coverage


• FSA, ST/LT Disability, Voluntary Life


• Carrot fertility benefits


• 20 days paid vacation + 10 holidays + unlimited sick leave


• 12 weeks fully paid parental leave


• Fitness: Monthly stipend for gyms, yoga classes, race registrations or whatever keeps you active


• Wellness: Monthly stipend for a massage, meditations class, therapy, or activities that enhance your well‑being


• Commuter benefits for hybrid employees in SF/NYC


• Unlimited token usage!

Please inquire directly with our recruiting team for benefits available to those working outside the US.

Equal Opportunity Employer

WorkOS is an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity and inclusiveness. We will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, nationality, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, disability or age.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.