We are seeking a Principal Developer Experience & Platform Engineer to serve as a builder, systems thinker, and organizational technical leader. Application demands are rapidly evolving, and the line between human and AI-driven development is shifting. In this role, you will define the long-term technical vision for Developer Experience and platform engineering across Conductor—ensuring our systems are legible, reliable, and effortless to build on for both human engineers and autonomous software agents.
You will bridge deep distributed systems architecture with developer product thinking. Operating across team boundaries, you will solve high-leverage software and build-system bottlenecks, evolve our hybrid cloud and bare-metal platforms, and craft the golden paths, CLIs, APIs, and abstractions that allow our engineering teams to move from idea to production with maximum velocity and confidence.
What You'll Do
- Define Strategy & DevEx Point of View: Set the multi-year technical roadmap for Developer Experience across build systems, CI/CD, deployment platforms, internal developer tooling, and agentic workflows. Apply a product mindset to internal platforms to treat software developers as your primary users.
- Architect Paved Roads & Developer Abstractions: Design, build, and maintain modern internal developer platforms, SDKs, CLIs, service templates, and APIs that make doing the right thing the easiest thing by default.
- Optimize Build Systems & CI/CD at Scale: Drive complex initiatives to reduce build and test times, optimize CI throughput across large codebases/monorepos, eliminate flaky tests, and ensure deployment orchestration is fast, safe, and easily reversible.
- Integrate Agentic & AI-Native Tooling: Design agent-safe developer interfaces and paved paths that allow LLM-driven workflows, AI coding agents, and human-in-the-loop automation to operate seamlessly within our build, test, and release cycles.
- Elevate System Reliability & Observability: Evolve our high-scale hybrid cloud, bare-metal infrastructure, terabyte-scale Elasticsearch clusters, and container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes). Drive SLOs, monitoring, and resilience patterns while maintaining enterprise-grade security.
- Technical Writing & Legibility: Own the internal documentation architecture and engineering standards. Ensure our platform, abstractions, and developer narratives remain clear, structured, and easy to navigate from an engineer’s first day to expert-level architecture.
- Uplevel & Mentor Engineering Leadership: Lead by example through clear code reviews, architectural guidance, and first-principles problem-solving. Mentor senior engineers and foster a collaborative, high-energy engineering culture.
Who You Are
- 15+ Years of Systems & Platform Engineering Experience: Proven track record of architecting, shipping, and owning large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and developer-facing platforms in fast-moving environments.
- Deep DevEx & Tooling Passion: Experience building internal platforms, CLIs, SDKs, build engines, or test frameworks with a relentless focus on API ergonomics, usability, and developer adoption.
- Strong Coding & Systems Fundamentals: Hands-on proficiency in modern software engineering languages (such as Go, TypeScript, or Python) with deep expertise in cloud-native ecosystems (Kubernetes, Docker, ArgoCD, Terraform).
- High Technical Legibility & Clear Writing: Exceptional ability to take complex systems and communicate them clearly through documentation, RFCs, technical narratives, and architectural diagrams.
- Agentic AI Vision: A forward-thinking perspective on how LLMs and software agents are reshaping developer workflows, and how to build reliable, well-governed platform interfaces to support them.
- Pragmatic Artisan Mindset: High bar for software quality and operational excellence, balanced with a startup-minded bias for action—knowing what to polish, what to simplify, and what to defer.
- Proven Technical Leadership: Experience influencing organizational strategy, aligning cross-functional teams, driving consensus across complex initiatives, and mentoring senior technical talent.
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Compensation: Conductor maintains competitive, performance-based compensation programs. The Berlin base salary range for this role is currently 130,000 - 160,000 euro.
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Conductor LLC is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Bringing in diverse perspectives and challenging our assumptions is the clear key to growth; it drives innovation, creativity, faster problem-solving, and stronger decision making. All aspects of employment including the decision to hire, promote, train, discipline, or discharge, will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs.
Conductor does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, or other characteristics protected by state or federal law or local ordinance. In addition, it is the policy of Conductor to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works.