Staff Software Engineer | Developer Experience

Meet DeepL. DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation. Founded in 2017 by CEO Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski, DeepL now has around 1,000 passionate employees and is supported by world-renowned investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures. Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact. To achieve this, we need talented people like you to join our journey.

What sets us apart is our blend of cutting-edge AI technology, meaningful work, and a culture where people truly thrive. We’re a team of innovators, researchers, and creators driven by a shared purpose to unlock human potential by making work simpler, smarter, and more connected. When we share what it’s like to work at DeepL, the reactions are overwhelmingly positive. This might be because of our technology that helps millions of people and businesses communicate and work better every day, or because of the trust, curiosity, and care that shape our culture. What we know for sure is this: being part of DeepL means joining a team dedicated to innovation, growth, and well-being.

You will join the Developer Experience track, whose customers are DeepL's own engineers. Every change that reaches our products, from a research prototype to a production release, travels through the platform, pipelines and workflows this track owns. Our job is to make that journey fast, safe and obvious, so that engineers spend their time on the problems only they can solve. That ownership runs the full width of the developer's day. It covers the foundation: source control, the CI and CD fleet that runs every pipeline across Kubernetes, macOS and Windows, build and dependency caching, and the artifact and package registries that hold what we ship. Having recently moved our source and CI onto GitLab SaaS, we are now shaping what a genuinely self-service platform looks like on top of it.

Your responsibilities include:

• Own technical direction for a significant part of the Developer Experience mandate.
• Identify where the biggest friction sits for our engineers, form a clear position on how to remove it, and see that work through to adoption.
• Lead initiatives that lift developer productivity across multiple engineering teams, by understanding and improving processes and tooling, and by drawing on both established software engineering practice and AI capability.
• Design and build the workflows and tooling that carry a change through the software development lifecycle, from local development through review to release.
• Lead our work on AI across that lifecycle.
• Evaluate what genuinely helps, build the guardrails that make it safe and useful at our scale, and be candid about what does not work.
• Treat internal developers as customers and grow a community around developer experience.
• Talk to them, watch where they struggle, and let evidence decide what to build and whether it landed, whether that evidence is survey data, delivery metrics or support load.
• Empower product teams to own their delivery journey, and turn consensus across engineering into shipped change.
• Define standards that hold across the track and drive migrations to them, bringing teams along with a working path rather than a deadline.
• Mentor engineers across the track and raise the technical bar of the group, through design reviews, architecture decisions and the everyday habits that keep systems maintainable.
• Share in operating what we build, including a sustainable on call rotation for the services and tooling other teams rely on.

Qualities we look for:

• A software engineering background, in any language, with real depth in at least one.
• Time in a product team, shipping to external customers.
• Genuine passion for developer experience.
• Enthusiasm for figuring out where AI creates real leverage in how software gets built.
• A track record of technical ownership spanning several teams.
• The judgement to trade the ideal solution for one you can ship and iterate on.

You would get bonus points for:

• Measuring developer productivity credibly, through DORA, developer surveys, or your own defensible approach.
• Having built or operated AI-assisted developer tooling.
• Experience building an internal developer platform or portal, especially with Backstage.
• Community building you can point to.
• GitLab or comparable CI and CD at scale.

What we offer:

• Diverse and internationally distributed team.
• Open communication, regular feedback.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours.
• Virtual Shares.
• Regular in-person team events.
• Monthly full-day hacking sessions.
• 30 days of annual leave.
• Competitive benefits.

If this role and our mission resonate with you, but you're hesitant because you don't check all the boxes, don't let that hold you back. At DeepL, it's all about the value you bring and the growth we can foster together. We can't wait to meet you!

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are - we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward!