Senior Backend Software Engineer, DevEx

About the Role

If you've been looking for the role where you can do your best work and make a real impact, this is it. As a Senior Backend Software Engineer, DevEx, you'll partner with Platform and product engineering teams to identify the highest-leverage quality opportunities and build the tooling that captures them. Zipline has strong engineering foundations. Your job is to make them exceptional. In an era where AI is reshaping how software gets built, you'll have the opportunity to bring that to bear on quality itself, raising the bar on what engineering confidence looks like at Zipline. Success here isn't measured by sophistication. It's measured by whether Zipline engineers ship faster and with more confidence because of what you built.

What You'll Do

• Assess and evolve Zipline's engineering practices: evaluate CI/CD pipelines, test coverage, and developer workflows to surface the highest-impact opportunities, establish DORA baselines, and co-develop a prioritized QE roadmap with engineering leads.
• Strengthen CI/CD quality gates, including linting, security scanning (SAST/SCA), and test coverage checks, expanding coverage across pipelines while keeping builds fast and teams unblocked.
• Build visibility into engineering health with quality dashboards that surface test coverage, failure rates, and deployment trends, paired with enhanced monitoring and alerting that helps teams catch issues before customers do.
• Explore and embed AI-powered tooling across the engineering workflow, from intelligent test generation and AI-assisted code review to LLM-powered anomaly detection, making quality faster and smarter.
• Streamline local development: faster environments, smoother onboarding, and automation that eliminates toil and keeps engineers moving.
• Manage and optimize containerized infrastructure on Kubernetes and AWS using Terraform, improving reliability and reducing manual operational burden.
• Partner with teams across engineering to embed good quality practices through influence and enablement.
• Evolve the platform over time toward more structured tooling: policy-as-code for architectural standards, API contract testing, spec validation, and lightweight self-service patterns, paced by what the team and the tooling have earned the right to build.
• Participate in on-call rotations and support critical platform and infrastructure issues.

What We Look For

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with at least 5 years in DevEx, DevOps or infrastructure with a strong developer productivity focus.
• Strong CI/CD pipeline experience (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or equivalent), with a track record of building, maintaining, and improving pipelines for reliability and speed.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted developer tooling, including code review agents, test generation, or LLM-powered quality checks, and a genuine curiosity for how AI can reshape the way engineering teams build and ship.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and AWS; comfortable managing containerized environments and cloud infrastructure via Terraform.
• Familiarity with SAST/SCA security scanning (Snyk, Semgrep, or equivalent) and how to integrate it into pipelines.
• Strong understanding of observability tools (Datadog, Sentry, or equivalent), including how to set up meaningful alerting and reduce noise.
• Proficiency in Ruby for building internal tooling and automation; experience with Ruby on Rails is a plus given our primary stack.
• Awareness of DORA metrics and developer experience frameworks.
• A pragmatic build-vs-buy mindset: you know when the right answer is making what already exists work better.
• Excellent communication skills and remote work discipline; you earn buy-in by making the platform genuinely useful, not by mandating standards.

Technologies You'll Work With

• Ruby on Rails (primary application stack)
• Postgres, Redis
• AWS, Heroku, Terraform
• GitHub, CircleCI, Docker, Kubernetes
• Datadog, Sentry (observability)
• Snyk, Semgrep (security scanning)
• Slack, JIRA, Google Drive
• Claude Code

CompensationAt Zipline, we're committed to paying our team fairly, transparently, and in a way that supports growth. This role is targeting an annual salary within the United Kingdom of £72,023 to £88,028.

The broad salary ranges reflect the growth someone will experience in the role, from developing skills to reaching expertise within their career level. We've found that hiring team members with the expectation of being accomplished in the role sets them up for success, which for this position on the United Kingdom band is £72,023. Salaries below this point typically reflect someone with potential but still building the necessary skills, while salaries above are for individuals already excelling in the role, with a deep understanding of Zipline's impact on customers, product, and company.

Our salary ranges are determined by market, factoring in our revenue and employee size and paying competitively. In higher cost of living markets, we apply 5-10% multipliers on our ranges, depending on the location, to maintain competitive compensation and reflective of the increased expenses our team members face in those areas.

What's In It For You

• Remote-first culture: Join a high performing, fully remote team and work where you're comfortable
• Stock Options: Get meaningful ownership in a fast-growing, venture-backed company shaping the future of retail.
• Time off: We believe rest fuels great work. Our flexible time-off policy gives you the freedom to take the breaks you need, when you need them—whether it's a long weekend or a well-deserved vacation. We'll also give you a monthly coffee-shop stipend to switch up your workspace and get inspired outside the office. And when you've been with us for five years? You'll earn a fully paid one-month sabbatical to truly unplug and reflect—we call it a thank-you for your impact and dedication.
• Benefits: World-class medical, dental, and vision policies.
• Team Connection: Annual company off-sites in fun locations. We've done New York, Costa Rica, Whistler, Palm Springs, San Diego, and Mexico City.
• Volunteering: Every quarter, Zipliners get a paid day off to volunteer for a nonprofit of their choice.
• Learning: We support continuous learning and provide unlimited access to our Udemy Business account
• Great humans, great work: Work with kind, collaborative teammates who care about doing meaningful work and making a real impact. We value diversity of all kinds and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of all different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives.