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DeepL is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Developer Experience track, owning the platform, pipelines, and workflows that enable DeepL's engineering organization to ship products safely and efficiently. You will own technical direction for a significant portion of the developer experience mandate, identifying friction points for engineers and driving solutions to adoption across multiple teams.
Key responsibilities include designing and building workflows that carry changes through the full software development lifecycle—from local development through code review to release. You will lead initiatives to lift developer productivity by improving processes and tooling, drawing on both established software engineering practices and AI capabilities. This includes evaluating AI-assisted tools like code review, building guardrails to ensure safety and usefulness at scale, and being candid about what doesn't work.
You will treat internal developers as customers, growing a community around developer experience through surveys, delivery metrics, and direct engagement. You'll define standards across the track and drive migrations to them, bringing teams along with working paths rather than mandates. Mentoring engineers across the track and raising the technical bar through design reviews and architecture decisions is core to the role. You will also share in operating the services and tooling other teams rely on, including a sustainable on-call rotation.
The Developer Experience track owns the full width of the developer's day: source control, CI/CD fleet running on Kubernetes, macOS, and Windows, build and dependency caching, artifact and package registries, internal developer portal and service catalogue in Backstage, Golden Path templates, release automation, automated guardrails for security and production readiness, and self-service access management. DeepL recently moved to GitLab SaaS and is now shaping what a genuinely self-service platform looks like on top of it.
You should have a strong software engineering background with real depth in at least one language (C#, Go, TypeScript, Python, or others). Product team experience shipping to external customers is highly valued—the best developer experience work comes from people who have personally felt the pipeline they are now redesigning. Genuine passion for developer experience, build systems, CI/CD, internal platforms, release engineering, and the texture of what makes a codebase pleasant to work in is essential.
