Developer Experience Engineer

About the role

NODA is a veteran-owned, venture-backed technology company transforming how unmanned systems collaborate in complex, mission-critical environments. Our distributed orchestration platform enables autonomous coordination of heterogeneous unmanned systems across air, sea, land, and space with vital applications in defense, intelligence, and commercial sectors. Developer Experience at NODA is not a support function - it is a force multiplier. We build the internal tooling, build systems, release automation, SDK workflows, and self-service developer surfaces that allow engineers to move from idea to validated artifact quickly and reliably.

As a Developer Experience Engineer, you will own the engineering systems that make NODA developers productive. You will improve the full developer lifecycle: local development, GitHub workflows, CI/CD, build optimization, test feedback, release automation, SDK packaging, documentation, and first-run experience. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who treats developer productivity as a systems problem. You will own the path from:

git push → validated build → packaged SDK → usable developer workflow

You will work closely with autonomy, simulation, platform, and field engineering teams to reduce friction and create fast, reliable, and reproducible workflows for both connected and constrained deployment environments.

What you'll do

• Own GitHub-based engineering workflows, including PR validation, CI triggers, quality gates, and release automation.
• Improve engineering feedback loops, build reliability, and deployment confidence across local and CI environments.
• Own the developer-facing SDK and CLI experience, including install flow, CLI ergonomics, Python package usability, examples, quickstarts, and release quality.
• Eliminate workflow friction and reduce dependency on tribal knowledge through automation and self-service tooling.
• Build and maintain reproducible, secure, and air-gapped developer and release workflows.
• Use metrics and developer feedback to continuously improve engineering workflows and platform adoption.
• Partner across autonomy, simulation, systems, and field engineering teams to ensure workflows reflect real operational needs.
• Design and optimize build, test, and release pipelines for speed, reliability, and security.
• Implement self-service tooling and documentation that enable developers to onboard, build, and deploy independently.
• Ensure SDKs, CLIs, and internal platforms are reliable, well-documented, and enjoyable to use.
• Collaborate with field engineering teams to support constrained deployment environments and edge use cases.
• Maintain and evolve internal standards for secure software supply chains and artifact provenance.
• Contribute to open-source-friendly internal tools that accelerate development across the organization.
• Support debugging across code, infrastructure, CI, packaging, and developer environments.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in Developer Experience, platform engineering, build/release engineering, infrastructure engineering, or software engineering focused on internal tools.
• Strong hands-on experience with CI/CD systems and automated release workflows.
• Experience designing and optimizing build, test, and release pipelines.
• Strong Python skills for tooling, automation, SDKs, or packaging.
• Experience owning SDKs, CLIs, or developer-facing platforms.
• Strong systems debugging skills across code, infrastructure, CI, packaging, and developer environments.
• Experience with containers and reproducible development environments.
• U.S. Citizenship with the ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with air-gapped, classified, CUI, or restricted-network deployment patterns.
• Experience supporting autonomy, robotics, simulation, edge, embedded, or defense-adjacent software workflows.
• Experience owning SDKs, CLIs, Python packages, or developer-facing platforms.
• Experience with Python packaging and distribution, including PyPI, containers, or offline bundles.
• Experience with cloud-backed build infrastructure, including AWS EC2, self-hosted runners, or ephemeral environments.
• Experience improving build performance in complex multi-language or systems-heavy codebases.
• Familiarity with distributed messaging systems such as Zenoh, DDS, MQTT, or similar.

Skills & attributes

• Product-minded: treats developers as users and internal platforms as products.
• Systems-oriented: understands the full path from local development to release artifact.
• Pragmatic builder: improves workflows without adding unnecessary process.
• High ownership: identifies bottlenecks, fixes them, and measures the result.
• Developer empathy: understands friction because they have built and shipped software themselves.
• Clear communicator: can document workflows, explain tradeoffs, and drive adoption across engineering teams.
• Security-aware: understands the requirements of defense and controlled deployment environments.
• AI-fluent: uses AI tools pragmatically to accelerate engineering workflows while maintaining strong engineering judgment and verification discipline.

Benefits & perks

Our culture fosters collaboration, respect, and trust, empowering passionate people to do their best work. We off