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.

Meet the team behind this journey

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.

It also covers everything an engineer actually touches: our internal developer portal and service catalogue in Backstage, the Golden Path templates and release automation that make the right thing the easy thing, automated guardrails for security and production readiness, self-service access management, and the AI tooling our engineers use every day, including AI-assisted code review. We measure whether any of it is working, through developer surveys and delivery metrics.

We treat developer experience as a product, not a support function. We are opinionated about paved roads, allergic to mandates without migration paths, and increasingly focused on a question the whole industry is still answering: what does an engineering organisation look like when AI is a first-class part of how software gets built?

Your responsibilities

• 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. Much of the work at this level is influence without authority.
• 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.

What we offer

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures.
• Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication. We value smooth collaboration, direct and actionable feedback, and believe that leading with empathy and growth mindset makes us better together.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home.
• Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role. We believe everyone should share in our success, and that’s why every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth and rewarding you with a stake in our future.
• Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together.
• Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about and get the opportunity to work with other teams.
• 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind. With 30 days off (excluding public holidays) and access to mental health resources, we make sure you're as strong mentally as you are professionally.
• Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package. We've crafted it to reflect the diversity of our team and tailored it to align with your unique location.

Qualities we look for

• A software engineering background, in any language, with real depth in at least one. We genuinely do not mind which: C#, Go, TypeScript and Python are all well represented here. We care that you can build software other engineers rely on, and that you can read your way into an unfamiliar codebase.
• Time in a product team, shipping to external customers. The best developer experience work comes from people who have personally felt the pipeline they are now redesigning, and who know what a product team is actually optimising for.
• Genuine passion for developer experience. Build systems, CI and CD, internal platforms, release engineering, and the texture of what makes a codebase pleasant or miserable to work in.
• Enthusiasm for figuring out where AI creates real leverage in how software gets built, a willingness to run experiments that fail, and enough scepticism to tell the difference between a genuine improvement and a demo.
• A track record of technical ownership spanning several teams. You create clarity where a mandate crosses team boundaries, hold clear positions, change them on evidence, and carry other engineers with you.
• The judgement to trade the ideal solution for one you can ship and iterate on, and the tenacity to keep going. Changing how an engineering organisation works is a long game, and adoption is the hard part.

Bonus points for

• Measuring developer productivity credibly, through DORA, developer surveys, or your own defensible approach.
• Having built or operated AI-assisted developer tooling: code review, agents, MCP servers, or evaluation of any of the above.
• Experience building an internal developer platform or portal, especially with Backstage.
• Community building you can point to. Open source maintainership, a guild or community of practice, developer advocacy, or any place you have grown adoption and ownership rather than mandated it.
• GitLab or comparable CI and CD at scale, and build system work on large polyglot codebases. Runner fleets, pipeline performance, caching and artifacts, and compile and test time optimisation.