Senior Software Engineer, Productivity & Tooling

Summary

Join Liftoff's Engineering Productivity team and play a pivotal role in enhancing product delivery and engineering efficiency. You will optimize developer workflows, build and maintain internal tools, and champion the adoption of best practices. Responsibilities include automating repetitive tasks, designing user-friendly tools, and consolidating developer metrics for improved visibility. You will also advocate for DORA metrics and SPACES-aligned outcomes, tailoring adoption strategies to individual team needs. The ideal candidate possesses strong programming skills, experience with cloud-native architectures, and a proven ability to drive measurable engineering improvements. This role offers full-time remote work in Canada with some travel required.

Requirements

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science or related field and 5+ years of experience; or Masters degree in Computer Science or related field and 3+ years of experience
• Strong programming skills in Go, Python, or JavaScript
• Demonstrated impact building internal developer platforms, CI/CD pipelines, or internal tooling that improve developer workflows
• Deep understanding of cloud-native and microservices architecture, including hands-on experience with tools like Argo , Flux , or similar CI/CD systems
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code , advanced test automation , or AIOps techniques to automate pipelines and dev environments
• Proven ability to use data (e.g., DORA metrics, workflow telemetry) to identify inefficiencies and drive measurable engineering improvements
• Solid grasp of engineering best practices such as trunk-based development , feature flags , and continuous integration , and how they affect software delivery performance
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a track record of applying lean or continuous improvement principles
• Experience designing and integrating APIs, especially for developer-facing services and workflows
• Excellent communication skills; able to collaborate across different stakeholders (e.g. engineering, product, and leadership teams)
• Experience influencing cross-team technical initiatives (e.g., rollout of new dev tools)
• Comfortable with independent ownership and iterating based on developer feedback

Responsibilities

• Optimize Developer Efficiency & Reduce Cognitive Load
• Eliminate Toil: Partner with engineering teams to identify friction points and automate repetitive workflows through custom tooling and integrations
• Design with Empathy: Apply continuous improvement principles to ensure new tools or processes enhance developer satisfaction without adding overhead
• Unify Metrics & Visibility: Consolidate developer metrics across repos, CI/CD, observability stacks, and dashboards to reduce context switching and improve situational awareness
• Drive Adoption of Engineering Practices and Tooling
• Champion DORA : Advocate for measurable engineering health through DORA metrics and SPACES-aligned outcomes. Stay current with industry trends and help teams internalize their relevance
• Partner for Lasting Change: Tailor adoption strategies to each team’s needs, co-developing solutions that integrate seamlessly into existing workflows
• Close the Feedback Loop: Post-adoption, follow up regularly to gather input, iterate on tooling, and sustain engagement
• Evolve Developer Workflow Platforms
• Automate Over Administer: Treat platforms like Jira, GitHub, or IDP as automation backbones - build scripts, webhooks, and workflows to improve coordination efficiency
• Enforce Quality Gates: Implement detection and guardrails to ensure high-quality ticket hygiene and traceability (e.g. for sprint planning, progress tracking, risk assessment, etc)
• Continuously Upgrade the Stack: Evaluate and adopt features that boost planning fidelity, feedback loops, and team clarity
• Instrument Developer Productivity with Data & Telemetry
• Integrate with Finance & Reliability: Build frameworks to automate reporting for finance, incident retros, or compliance workflows
• Build Visibility Dashboards: Create real-time views of engineering throughput, DORA metrics, bottlenecks, and system health. Partner with Technical Managers to drive data-informed improvements
• Enable Self-Service Insights: Empower engineering teams to make informed, autonomous decisions with minimal external dependencies

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with IDP solutions (eg. Port.io)
• Leading or contributing to DORA metric adoption , using data to improve speed and reliability
• Applying user-centric DevEx design principles (e.g., reducing build times, feedback loops) to drive adoption across teams
• Curiosity and hands-on experience with Generative AI in developer workflows (e.g., code generation, PR summarization, chatops)
• Fluency in Mandarin (or other languages) for collaboration with distributed/global teams
• Experience enabling distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones through technical enablement and tooling

Benefits

• Health/vision/dental benefits
• Equity
• Full-time remote work in Canada