Senior Software Engineer (Developer Experience)

About The Role

This is not a seat-filling role. We're a Series A company in scaling mode, shipping more code every week, and the systems that let us ship quickly and confidently need someone who owns them.

That's this role. You'll own the tools, workflows, and guardrails that let every engineer at Rec move fast without breaking things. CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, end-to-end test coverage, local development environments, data snapshots, package upgrades, the infrastructure of engineering itself. When we ship a regression, it's your systems that should have caught it. When onboarding a new engineer takes a day instead of a week, it's your work that made the difference.

You'll work closely with our Infrastructure engineer on the foundation, and with every product engineer on the team to understand where the friction lives and how to remove it. You'll still contribute to product code when the work crosses into your domain, but the primary job is making the whole engineering org faster and more reliable.

What You'll Do

• Own our CI/CD pipelines. Make builds fast, reliable, and easy to debug. Every minute saved compounds across the team.

• Build out automated testing and end-to-end test coverage. Design the quality safeguards that catch regressions before they reach production.

• Maintain and improve local development environments. New engineers should be productive on day one, and existing engineers shouldn't lose a morning to environment drift.

• Manage data snapshots and seed data for local and staging environments. Realistic data makes realistic testing.

• Drive package upgrades, dependency hygiene, and the unglamorous work that keeps the platform from rotting.

• Partner with the Infrastructure engineer on the shared foundation, and with product engineers to understand where friction slows them down.

• Use AI tools fluently to accelerate this work, from generating test coverage to automating upgrade PRs to analyzing CI flakiness. This role has real room to push what's possible with AI-assisted tooling.

• Contribute to product code when the work touches developer experience.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building software in collaborative environments, with meaningful time spent on developer tooling, testing infrastructure, or CI/CD.

• You're fired up by the mission. We work hard because recreation matters to families, coaches, and kids across the country. We also ski, hike, and get outside. We're building for recreation, after all.

• AI fluency is non-negotiable. You already use AI tools daily and have real judgment about when to trust them, when to verify, and when to override. If AI tools aren't yet core to how you work, this role will be a rough fit.

• Deep experience with CI/CD systems. You know what makes a pipeline fast, what makes it flaky, and how to tell the difference. You've debugged the weird cases.

• You think about testing as a product. Test infrastructure is a deliverable, not an afterthought. You care about coverage, but you care more about whether the tests actually catch real bugs.

• You reduce friction where others accept it. You notice the slow build, the flaky test, the painful local setup, the package that's three major versions behind. And you fix it.

• You ship with quality. Fast, clean, and proud, but never careless. Every customer transaction matters to us: a missed swim lesson registration, a double-booked court, a failed payment. Reliability is the baseline.

• You thrive in ambiguity. Developer experience work is rarely well-defined. You figure out what's actually worth doing, and you do it without over-engineering.

• You work like a partner , not just a coder. You think end-to-end alongside the rest of Engineering, and you know that great DevEx work is a service to the whole team.

• You communicate clearly , candidly, and constructively. Strong opinions, loosely held, with a bias toward what works.

Our Stack

• Frontend: Next.js (hosted on Vercel), React, TypeScript

• Backend: Node.js, Koa, Objection.js, PostgreSQL

• Infra & Ops: AWS, Temporal, Twilio

• Where you'll spend most of your time: CI/CD systems, testing frameworks and end-to-end tooling, local development and staging environments, and the AI tooling that accelerates all of it.

• AI & Tooling: AI proficiency is mandatory here, not optional. Every engineer uses AI tools daily, for code generation and review, for operational work via MCP servers and tool use, and for data analysis. We expect you to already be fluent with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent, and to have strong judgment about when to lean on AI and when to override it.

Pay & Benefits

• Compensation: $140,000–$200,000 base + meaningful equity (final offer will be based on your background, experience and skillset)

• Benefits: Flexible PTO, top-tier health/dental/vision, and a 401(k) plan to support your future.

• Work location: We're building a team that works together in person at our downtown San Francisco office. If you're Bay Area-based, you'll be in the office most days, because that's where the momentum, collaboration, and magic really happen. But we're also human. Need remote days while traveling? Want to spend a week with family on the East Coast? Totally fine. We trust you to balance real life with real impact.

Ready to build something real? Something fun? Something big? We're ready for you.