Senior Software Engineer - Developer Experience

Senior Software Engineer - Developer Experience

Redwood City, CA (Hybrid); San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn't start with the model, it starts with the data.

We're on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes since 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world's largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!

About the Role

We are hiring a senior engineer to join our Developer Experience (DevEx) team — a small, high-impact group responsible for elevating how engineering builds, tests, ships, and collaborates. This role is ideal for someone who wants to own strategy, influence engineering-wide workflows, and grow into a Tech Lead Manager (TLM)

You'll shape our AI-native development environment, modernize CI/CD platforms (CircleCI, Buildkite, GitHub Actions), integrate AI SRE tooling, and mentor engineers across levels. Your work will directly accelerate developer velocity, reliability, and product quality across the company.

What You'll Do

• Set the strategy and architecture for our local development environment, build systems, testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and AI-assisted coding workflows (Claude Code, Claude MD-in-repo workflows)
• Own the CI health and experience, maintain metrics to track CI health, developer productivity, effective usage of AI and build roadmap to constantly improve
• End-to-end ownership of our release pipeline and lead the transition from scheduled releases to a robust, automated continuous deployment framework
• Deep experience and opinion in standardizing for effective usage of AI coding and reviewing agents for faster development, review and incident investigation
• Ship a clear multi-quarter DevEx roadmap and lead cross-team adoption
• Mentor and technically guide engineers within and outside of the team with best practices to improve quality and velocity; potential to grow into TLM ownership as the team grows
• Partner with cross-functional teams to design and deliver improvements to dev-infra, release processes, and internal tooling.
• Proactively identify bottlenecks and drive large-scale DX initiatives — e.g., cutting flaky tests, improving PR iteration speed, increasing automated test coverage, and reducing infra cost
• Present plans, tradeoffs, and progress to engineering leadership; serve as a thought partner for org-wide developer experience strategy.
• Champion experimentation and roll-out of AI-native development workflows, coding assistants, test-generation tools, and autonomous CI bots.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including deep ownership of build, test, or CI/CD systems
• Proven experience owning and evolving CI/CD systems for large-scale codebases, focusing on reliability, scalability, and developer productivity
• Demonstrated experience defining and executing roadmaps for developer experience initiatives and internal engineering tooling
• Deep understanding of how to effectively integrate AI agents into the development workflow to accelerate engineering velocity and improve developer experience.
• Strong background in developer productivity, distributed systems, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• Track record of leading complex engineering initiatives, influencing stakeholders, and delivering measurable impact
• Excellent communication skills; able to translate technical constraints into clear plans for non-technical audiences
• Comfortable working with:
• Infra & deployment technologies: Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes
• CI/CD systems: CircleCI, Buildkite, GitHub Actions, Helm
• Build systems like Poetry, pip, uv
• Experience designing and operating large-scale developer workflows and improving engineering best practices.

Nice to Have

• Experience in hyper-growth startup environments or scaling engineering orgs.
• Experience with AI development workflows, AI-assisted code generation, or SRE automation or strong excitement to learn.
• Prior experience as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or Hands on Engineering Manager.

Actual compensation will be determined based on factors including skills, qualifications, experience, and geographic location.

Salary range(s) for this role

$220,000 - $260,000 USD

Be Your Best at Snorkel

Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly—offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you'll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success. Whether you're looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you're fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.

Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Snorkel AI prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, performance, merit, and business need.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.