Staff software engineer, developer experience

Rocket Lab; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 227,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading sustainability platform is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to enhance developer infrastructure. The role involves building productive and robust tools for local development, improving testing workflows, and collaborating across teams. Candidates should have extensive engineering experience and familiarity with modern tech stacks in a dynamic startup environment.

Benefits

Equity

Health/Dental/Vision Insurance

401(k) Plan

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Paid Parental Leave

Fertility Programs

Mental Health Programs

Qualifications

• 6+ years of engineering experience.
• Experience building internal productivity and platform tools.
• Familiarity with tech stack and debugging tools.

Responsibilities

• Establish a new team focusing on local dev efficiency.
• Collaborate with Engineering teams to improve tools and workflows.
• Improve observability for production and local development.

Skills

Problem Solving

Collaboration

Engineering Principles

Tools

Javascript/Typescript/React

GCP

Postgres

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

About Watershed

Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. We are looking for team members who love product-building, want to work hard at a mission-oriented startup, and will collaborate with us in shaping the culture of a growing team.

We have offices in San Francisco, New York, London and Sydney, and remote team members across the US and Europe. We hope that you'll be interested in joining us!

The role

Watershed is a software platform for running a world-class climate program. We measure our success in the carbon reduction achievements of our customers. We are looking for team members who love building enabling systems that empower other engineers and power a high-quality product experience.

We’re building out our developer infrastructure function within the Foundations organization. Help us accelerate our entire engineering organization and encode best practices in our tools!

In this role, you will:

• Help pioneer and establish a new team focused on local dev efficiency, testing, observability, and reliability tooling for developers at Watershed
• Work on tools that make local development and production monitoring more effective and efficient, improving both the ergonomics and efficiency of our test/observability infrastructure across local development, CI, and production
• Collaborate with other Infrastructure functions and all Engineering teams to design and implement additional testing, staging, and release workflows
• Make it easy to do things the right way (testability, observability, security, performance, etc.)
• Work on a distributed team across US timezones

You might be a good fit if you have:

• 6+ years of engineering experience
• Experience building internal dev productivity and platform tools that help engineers in scalable and sustainable ways, and a passion for enabling other engineers to move quickly and safely
• A track record of proactively identifying systemic challenges and navigating ambiguity to resolve them, especially spanning team lines in an Engineering organization
• Familiarity with some portions of our tech stack: Javascript/Typescript/React, GCP (or similar cloud providers), Postgres, GitHub Actions, Temporal, OpenTelemetry, Terraform, Playwright, Honeycomb, as well as shell scripting and debugging/profiling/benchmarking

This role will be based in our San Francisco or New York City office.

At Watershed, we strive to design consistent, fair, and competitive compensation programs. The total cash compensation range may be inclusive of several levels at Watershed and final offer will be determined by a number of factors, including the candidate’s skills, capabilities, and location, as well as scope of the role.

The anticipated cash compensation range is in addition to a total rewards benefit package including equity, health/dental/vision insurance, 401(k), unlimited paid time off, paid parental leave, fertility, and mental health programs etc.

Salary Range

$189,000—$227,000 USD

FAQ

Where does Watershed work?

We have hub offices in San Francisco, New York and London, and some remote team members in the US and EU. Most of our jobs need to be in San Francisco / New York / London, but certain jobs are open to being remote and will be specifically noted on the jobs page and in the job description.

What’s the interview process like?

It starts the same for every candidate: getting to know the team members through 1 to 2 conversations about Watershed, your experience, and your interests. Next steps can vary by role, but usual next steps are a skill or experience screen (e.g. a coding interview for an engineer, a portfolio review for a designer, deeper experience call for other roles) which leads to a virtual or in person interview panel after that if the screens go well. We prioritize transparency and lack of surprise throughout the process.

What if I need accommodations for my interview?

At Watershed, we are dedicated to ensuring an inclusive recruitment process. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities, long-term conditions, mental health needs, religious observances, neurodivergence, or pregnancy-related support requirements. If you need assistance during your process, please contact your recruiter.