Software Engineer - Platform & Productivity
ABOUT THE ROLE 💭
The Platform team builds the shared backend components and development systems that every WorkOS product, workflow, and team member depends on.
On the platform side, we build common backend capabilities used across WorkOS, including our events infrastructure, webhooks, email delivery, outbox-pattern queues, and more. These systems allow product teams to scale without rebuilding the same critical primitives. Because they sit on critical paths across our products, scalability, latency, consistency, reliability, and operational simplicity matter deeply.
On the productivity side, we build the systems that take code from an idea to production, including CI/CD, build and test infrastructure, deployment workflows, and internal tooling. As agents play a larger role in software development and increase the volume of code and concurrent changes, we are rethinking this platform to scale with that volume through safe execution, fast feedback, relevant context, and verifiable outcomes.
Our internal teams are our customers. Success means they can build and operate products faster, adopt shared capabilities instead of creating one-off solutions, and confidently delegate more work to agents.
WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON ✔️
- Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency shared backend systems that preserve consistency and durability through retries, duplicates, reordering, partial failures, and high concurrency
- Create platform interfaces, abstractions, and paved paths with a clean developer experience that makes shared capabilities easy for product teams to adopt
- Rotate across and embed with product teams to experience their workflows directly, understand their friction, and use those insights to shape platform investments
- Map evolving product-team needs and collaborate with the Foundations team to introduce new systems and primitives, such as scalable search, database partitioning, and archival strategies
- Own and evolve our CI/CD, build, test, deployment, and release infrastructure to shorten feedback loops and make production changes safer
- Reimagine CI/CD for an agentic software development lifecycle by building isolated, reproducible, and verifiable execution environments, along with automated loops that allow agents to diagnose failures, update changes, rerun validation, and safely move work through review, deployment, and production verification
- Instrument the entire software development lifecycle and use metrics such as feedback time, CI reliability, deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate to identify bottlenecks and verify that platform investments improve engineering outcomes
- Own platform reliability end to end, including observability, capacity planning, incident response, root-cause analysis, and prevention
- Shape the long-term platform strategy with a high bar for introducing new infrastructure. Thoroughly evaluate vendors and existing solutions, make deliberate build-versus-buy decisions, and account for operational complexity, lock-in, migration cost, reversibility, and long-term ownership
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR 🌟
- 8+ years of software development experience, with a track record of owning high-impact technical projects
- Experience building and operating distributed systems or platform services at scale, with a strong understanding of event-driven systems, queues, concurrency, idempotency, consistency, backpressure, retries, and failure recovery
- Experience building or operating CI/CD, build systems, test infrastructure, deployment platforms, or similar developer tooling
- A track record of designing platforms, frameworks, and tooling with a clean developer experience that makes complex capabilities easy for other engineers to adopt and operate
- Strong operational instincts across observability, capacity planning, incident response, and reliability
- Hands-on experience with AI coding agents, or a strong interest in building agentic CI/CD systems, verifiable execution environments, automated feedback loops, evaluations, and verification
- Exceptional pragmatism and technical judgment. You treat major infrastructure changes with the gravity they deserve and make deliberate, evidence-based decisions about when to build, buy, or improve an existing system
- Ability to move between long-term architecture and hands-on implementation while making thoughtful tradeoffs in an ambiguous environment
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience documenting systems and influencing technical direction across teams
- Familiarity with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Postgres, AWS, Terraform, and queueing or streaming systems such as SQS and Kinesis is helpful, but not required
We expect strong depth in either distributed platform systems or developer infrastructure, along with an interest in working across both.