Senior Staff Software Developer (Developer Productivity & AI Tooling)
Toronto, Canada
Senior Level
Full-Time
About the role
- We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Developer to lead the evolution of our developer experience and AI-powered engineering ecosystem. In this role, you’ll operate as a technical leader and architect across the organization, shaping strategy, defining standards, and driving large-scale initiatives that improve developer velocity, system reliability, and engineering quality
- You’ll work at the intersection of developer tooling, platform infrastructure, and AI-assisted development, pioneering how Robinhood engineers build, test, deploy, and operate software
- Architect and build scalable systems that enable fast, reliable delivery of full-stack applications, with a strong focus on enhancing the overall developer experience
- Set technical direction and standards for developer infrastructure across build systems, CI/CD, testing, and local development
- Lead design reviews, operational readiness, and post-incident analysis for critical developer platforms
- Leveraging AI to power the next generation development workflow
- Identify and eliminate friction across the software development lifecycle
- Build and evolve developer tooling including CLIs, configuration systems, and local/remote development environments
- Drive improvements in build systems, test automation, and deployment workflows
- Champion best practices in code quality, observability, and operational excellence
- Lead adoption of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Copilot, Claude) across engineering teams
- Design and implement agentic workflows for development and operations (e.g., automated code generation, incident triage, root cause analysis)
- Evaluate and integrate AI agents for anomaly detection, alert correlation, and automated remediation
- Establish best practices for safe, secure, and effective use of AI in software development
- Design and operate services on AWS with strong attention to scalability, cost efficiency, and security
- Lead Kubernetes-based platform improvements, including developer workflows for containerized environments
- Drive Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) strategy and adoption across environments
- Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Harness, Jenkins, CircleCI) with a focus on reliability and speed
- Own non-functional requirements including availability, scalability, latency, and security
- Ensure systems are observable through metrics, logs, and alerting
- Lead incident response, postmortems, and continuous improvement efforts
- Reduce operational toil through automation and platform improvements
- Partner with Product, Platform, and SRE teams to align on long-term technical strategy
- Lead large-scale, cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams
- Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical bar across the organization
- Contribute to a strong engineering culture centered on ownership, quality, and continuous improvement- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at Staff or Senior Staff level
- Deep expertise in developer infrastructure (CI/CD, build systems, testing frameworks, dev environments, observability)
- Strong backend engineering skills with proficiency in Go, Python, or TypeScript/JavaScript
- Exceptional system design skills, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and performance
- Proven track record of leading complex, cross-functional platform initiatives at scale
- Experience with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, service discovery, distributed systems)
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and cloud platforms like GCP
- Experience building internal developer platforms, CLIs (preferably in Go), and productivity tooling
- Strong understanding of CI/CD systems (e.g., CircleCI, Jenkins, Harness) and release orchestration
- Interest or experience in applying AI to developer productivity, incident management, or automation
- Strong technical leadership with the ability to influence across teams and organizational boundaries
- Experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools in production environments
- Ability to evaluate and safely integrate AI systems into engineering workflows
- Excellent communication skills, with experience driving alignment across engineering and product stakeholders
- Passion for developer experience and enabling other engineers to do their best work