[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer, Quality and Release Platform @dbt Labs

Role Description

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Quality and Release Platform (QARP) team and lead the technical direction of the platforms that power how dbt Labs builds, tests, and ships software. Our mission spans two critical areas:

• Release engineering — making it easy for engineers to ship changes quickly, safely, and reliably.
• Code quality — building a platform that raises the bar for code quality across all of dbt Labs engineering.

In this role, you can expect to:

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Unlimited vacation (and yes we use it!)
• 401k w/3% guaranteed contribution
• Excellent healthcare
• Paid Parental Leave
• Wellness stipend
• Home office stipend, and more!

Company Description

dbt Labs is the pioneer of analytics engineering, helping data teams transform raw data into reliable, actionable insights. Since 2016, we’ve grown from an open source project into the leading analytics engineering platform, now used by over 90,000 teams every week, driving data transformations and AI use cases.

We’re backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter. At our core, we believe in empowering data practitioners:

• Reliable, high-quality data is the fuel that propels AI-powered data engineering.
• AI is changing data work, fast. dbt’s data control plane keeps data engineers ahead of that curve.
• We empower engineers to deliver reliable, governed data faster, cheaper, and at scale.

dbt Labs is now synonymous with analytics engineering, defining the modern data stack and serving as the data control plane for enterprise teams around the world. And we’re just getting started. We’re growing fast and building a team of passionate, curious people across the globe.