Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience
$170k - $220k USD
Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.
The Opportunity at Altana
The Developer Experience team owns the infrastructure and tooling that our engineering organization uses every day: our monorepo, our CI/CD platform, and the day-to-day experience of working within our codebase. As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll be responsible for ensuring developers have fast, reliable, and frictionless workflows—from the moment they clone the repo to when their code ships to production.
Altana operates across a multi-cloud environment that's evolving rapidly, with deployments spanning commercial and government-compliant contexts. You'll design patterns and tooling that work consistently across these varied environments while maintaining the flexibility to move quickly. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering and infrastructure—you'll need to think like an application developer, reason about distributed systems, and understand cloud platforms deeply.
You'll work closely with engineering teams across Altana to understand their pain points, identify opportunities for improvement, and build tooling that multiplies developer productivity. Success in this role means faster builds, tighter feedback loops, and engineers who can focus on solving problems rather than fighting their tools.
Your Responsibilities
- Optimize build performance and CI/CD pipeline efficiency, reducing build times and improving reliability
- Design and implement improvements to pre-commit testing, PR status checks, and code review workflows in our monorepo
- Architect and build internal tooling, CLIs, and automation that streamline common developer tasks—with attention to maintainability and extensibility
- Design patterns and abstractions that work consistently across our multi-cloud environment, including deployments with heightened security requirements
- Improve local development environments, ensuring engineers can iterate quickly with minimal friction
- Instrument and monitor developer workflows to identify bottlenecks, then drive measurable improvements
- Collaborate with engineering teams to understand their needs and translate them into platform capabilities
- Document best practices, create onboarding materials, and support engineers in adopting new tools and workflows
- Evaluate and integrate new technologies that improve developer productivity, build reliability, or operational efficiency
- Contribute to the evolution of our monorepo strategy, including code organization, dependency management, and testing patterns
About You
- 5+ years of experience spanning software engineering and infrastructure, with a focus on developer tooling, platform engineering, or DevOps
- Strong software engineering fundamentals—you can design well-architected systems, not just scripts and glue code
- Deep experience with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI, or similar) and understanding of how to scale them
- Proficiency in Golang and/or Python for automation and tooling development
- Experience working with monorepo architectures and the challenges they present at scale
- Production experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and understanding of cloud-native patterns
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Ability to design patterns that work consistently across multiple environments with varying constraints
- Deep understanding of build systems, dependency management, and strategies for optimizing build performance
- Developer empathy—you understand that fast feedback loops drive productivity and you're motivated by making other engineers more effective
- Self-directed and independent, thriving in fast-moving environments with evolving requirements
- Excellent problem-solving skills and comfort debugging complex systems across application and infrastructure layers
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, comfortable working with technical teams to understand requirements and design solutions
Nice to Have
- Experience with Buildkite specifically
- Familiarity with GitHub Enterprise Cloud administration and GitHub Apps
- Experience with build caching strategies (remote caching, incremental builds)
- Background in developer productivity metrics and measurement
- Experience with containerized development environments or remote development solutions
- Experience designing tooling that works across multiple cloud providers or isolated environments
- Understanding of software supply chain security and secure CI/CD practices
Technologies We Love
- Languages: Python, TypeScript, Go
- CI/CD: Buildkite, GitHub Actions
- Source Control: GitHub Enterprise Cloud, monorepo tooling
- Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform
- Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana
This role can remote or based in New York City, or the San Francisco Bay Area with an expectation of occasional travel as needed.
US Salary Range and Benefits
$170,000 - $220,000
The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:
- Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
- Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
- Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
- Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
- 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
- Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
- Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
- Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
- Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
- Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses
The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.
Equal Opportunity Statement
At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.
Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.
Our Values
Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave.They form the foundation of Altana’s culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers.
- Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable.
- Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It’s how we respond when things don’t go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward.
- Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work. Each of us is personally responsible for fostering a workplace where people can thrive. And we are stewards of the greater good of the company. By holding ourselves and each other accountable, we build a culture of innovation and collective success that reflects the scale of our mission.
- Courage: Courage is what unlocks the seemingly impossible for our customers. It’s the core value that drives us make bold moves and take on big, complicated network problems—the ones others avoid. We know success isn't guaranteed, but we have the audacious vision to believe a solution is possible and to build it. Courage fuels our growth mindset. It means embracing challenges that make us stronger, and it’s demonstrated by how we approach hard conversations and complex projects.
At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.
Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.