Staff Product Engineer, Developer Experience
Nscale is hiring a Staff Product Engineer, Developer Experience in Houston, New York and San Francisco, United States. It pays $220k-$267k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Nscale.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
- The posting mentions Terraform, Kubernetes and software engineering among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Nscale has 299 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Define and scale developer experiences, SDKs, and paved roads for cloud and infrastructure workloads.
About the role
We’re seeking a Staff Product Engineer to define the paved roads developers use to adopt, operate, and scale on Nscale, from first API call to production workloads.
This is a high-impact IC role for someone who operates beyond a single squad: setting technical direction, owning multi-quarter roadmaps, and driving cross-team delivery for developer-facing products and paved roads.
You’ll work end-to-end across discovery, design, build, and iteration, partnering closely with Product, Design, Platform, SRE, and Security, to ship developer experiences that are measurable improvements in speed, reliability, and trust.
Scope & impact
- Owns strategy and outcomes for a DevEx domain (e.g., onboarding & activation, API/SDK experience, Console/Fleet Manager foundations, IaC workflows, or internal developer tooling).
- Influences multiple teams by establishing standards, reusable components, and clear paved roads.
- Leads cross-team technical programs from strategy through delivery; navigates ambiguity and makes high-leverage trade-offs.
- Raises the quality bar through instrumentation, reliability discipline, and operational ownership.
Responsibilities
- Set direction and roadmap: define a multi-quarter strategy for a DevEx domain, including sequencing, milestones, and success metrics.
- Lead cross-team delivery: drive execution across teams and repos; align dependencies, unblock delivery, and ensure high-quality outcomes.
- Build and evolve core DevEx surfaces and foundations:
- Console/Fleet Manager experiences and shared UI foundations
- Developer tooling (CLIs, generators, templates, local dev workflows)
- API/SDK experience (ergonomics, versioning, examples, docs)
- Terraform/IaC workflows and operational patterns
- Documentation and onboarding flows that reduce time-to-first-success
- Instrument and iterate: define KPIs (activation/time-to-first-success, adoption funnels, reliability, latency, satisfaction), implement telemetry, and build feedback loops.
- Establish durable quality gates: pragmatic testing strategy, performance budgets, accessibility standards, observability, and safe release patterns (feature flags, canaries/rollbacks).
- Drive platform coherency: standardize patterns and shared components so product squads integrate cleanly without central gatekeeping.
- Security and governance: ensure RBAC/IAM, PII handling, auditability, and safe defaults are built into developer workflows.
- Mentor and multiply: coach senior engineers, raise engineering standards via design reviews and patterns, and help teams adopt DevEx paved roads.
Requirements
- Significant experience shipping developer-facing products or platforms (tooling, portals, APIs/SDKs, docs, dashboards) with strong product sense and engineering fundamentals.
- The tech you’ll be using includes Go, TypeScript / React, OpenAPI, CLIs, SDKs, Terraform providers, telemetry, and automation.
- Proficiency in Go, or clear evidence you can ramp quickly in Go-based developer tooling.
- Proven ability to operate at Staff scope: leading ambiguous cross-team work through strategy, architecture, and delivery.
- Strong full-stack capability across TypeScript / React, Go-based tooling, telemetry, and automation.
- Experience with OpenAPI-driven or contract-first development.
- Track record of operational ownership: reliability, performance, and safe incremental delivery in production.
- Strong written communication: can write specs and RFCs that translate into systems that are built, tested, and maintained.
- Practical experience using AI as a force multiplier in workflow and/or product, with attention to cost/latency and reliability.
Preferred
- Experience shipping CLIs, SDKs, Terraform providers/modules, or other tools developers automate against.
- Release engineering for developer tools, including semantic versioning, deprecation policy, signed releases, package registries, or compatibility guarantees.
- Experience scaling a design system or shared UI foundations across multiple product teams.
- Experience building AI-assisted developer features with strong evaluation and observability.
- Experience with cloud/platform products and operator workflows (auditing, IAM, reliability/observability).
What success looks like
- A key developer journey measurably improves (activation, time-to-first-success, reliability, or satisfaction) and the improvements sustain over time.
- Multiple teams adopt shared DevEx paved roads and standards, reducing bespoke solutions and integration friction.
- Delivery speed increases without sacrificing quality, backed by stable metrics and reliable release signals.
The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.
Salary Range$220,000—$266,667 USDFor information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.
Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.
How we rate this
Staff Product Engineer, Developer Experience at Nscale rates 25 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where software engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where developer experience was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where sdk development was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where api design was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where cloud infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Software Engineering, Developer Experience, Sdk Development, API Design, and Cloud Infrastructure. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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