Staff Software Engineer, Quality and Release Platform

dbt Labs is the pioneer of analytics engineering, helping data teams transform raw data into reliable, actionable insights. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of the Quality and Release Platform, focusing on release engineering and code quality to enhance developer velocity and reliability across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical strategy and architecture for our CI/CD platform, release management systems, and code quality platform
• Design and build tooling, frameworks, and automation that help engineering teams maintain and improve code quality across the organization
• Lead high-impact initiatives that improve automation, observability, and self-service capabilities for engineers across the organization
• Mentor and level up other engineers on the team, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement
• Collaborate across teams and with engineering leadership to identify systemic challenges in our delivery and quality processes and architect solutions to address them
• Evolve our release architecture to support dbt Cloud's multi-cloud, cell-based infrastructure at scale
• Establish best practices and standards for build pipelines, release workflows, code quality, and infrastructure-as-code that are adopted across engineering
• Serve as a thought leader in engineering's internal AI strategy — evaluating AI-assisted development tools, defining adoption practices and guardrails, and enabling developers to use AI effectively across the org

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in platform, infrastructure, release engineering, or developer tooling
• A track record of leading technical strategy and architecture for complex, production-scale CI/CD, code quality, or platform systems
• Deep experience with one or more of the following: Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform, GitHub Actions, or Kubernetes
• Strong background in Python, Go, or Rust for automation, platform tooling, or systems development
• Passion for code quality and experience building or improving tools, linters, static analysis, testing frameworks, or CI checks that help teams write better code
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-team initiatives and influence engineering-wide practices and standards
• Excellent communication skills — able to translate complex technical concepts for diverse audiences and lead through influence
• Demonstrated interest or hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools and practices, with a perspective on how AI can improve engineering productivity and code quality
• Experience working asynchronously as part of a fully remote, distributed team
• Experience with Kargo or similar progressive delivery systems
• Hands-on experience with multi-cloud architectures (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience building code quality platforms, static analysis tooling, or testing infrastructure at scale
• Experience defining and rolling out engineering-wide code quality standards or best practices
• A track record of improving developer productivity or release safety across a large engineering organization
• Experience mentoring engineers and shaping team culture in a staff or principal-level role
• Track record of evaluating, championing, and rolling out AI developer tools (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) within an engineering organization
• Experience defining guidelines, guardrails, or best practices for AI-assisted development