About Semaphore
Semaphore is a remote-first software company building continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) products for engineering teams. Our customers rely on Semaphore Cloud and our self-hosted enterprise products to build, test, and deliver software securely and reliably.
We have spent years building developer infrastructure at scale. We are now using that foundation to create new products and capabilities for a world in which software is increasingly built by people working with AI coding agents.
About the role
We are looking for a senior product engineer who can take an important idea from an early, ambiguous problem to a useful product running in production.
You will work across product and engineering boundaries: understanding the user, shaping the solution, making technical decisions, building the system, and improving it based on real use. Some work will extend mature Semaphore products. Some will start as a small experiment or a new product. In either case, you will be responsible for getting to a strong outcome, not completing a predefined list of tickets.
AI coding agents are part of our daily engineering workflow. We expect you to use them fluently to explore, build, test, and ship faster. You remain accountable for the work: choosing the right problem, setting direction, making trade-offs, reviewing what is produced, and ensuring that the result is coherent, reliable, and maintainable.
This role is for someone with strong ownership, initiative, taste, and judgment. You should be comfortable moving between product questions, system design, code, infrastructure, and user experience as the work requires.
What you will own
- Take product ideas from problem definition through design, implementation, rollout, and iteration, including experiments that may grow into standalone products.
- Work directly with users and internal stakeholders to identify the real problem, decide what is worth building, and make pragmatic scope and architecture decisions.
- Build across backend services, APIs, infrastructure-facing components, and focused frontend experiences, reusing proven Semaphore systems before introducing new infrastructure.
- Use AI coding agents effectively while maintaining a high bar for correctness, security, clarity, and product quality.
- Own the production outcome, including reliability, observability, supportability, and working within Semaphore's security and compliance requirements. Communicate decisions, progress, and risks clearly.
What we are looking for
- A track record of independently shipping meaningful software products or major product capabilities.
- Strong product judgment: you can identify the essential user problem, reduce unnecessary scope, and recognize when an experience is good enough to ship—or not good enough yet.
- Strong engineering judgment across system design, implementation, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Strong backend and systems fundamentals, including APIs, asynchronous processing, service boundaries, state and lifecycle management, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
- Comfort with infrastructure concepts such as virtual machines, storage, networking, authentication, secrets, containers, and cloud platforms.
- Ability to navigate a polyglot environment. Semaphore systems include Go, Elixir, Ruby, React, and related technologies; expertise in every language is not required.
- Enough frontend capability to build or extend focused product user experiences without depending on a separate team for every change.
- Fluency with modern AI-assisted development: decomposing work for agents, supplying useful context, reviewing generated changes, and building verification into the workflow.
- Initiative and persistence. You make progress with incomplete information, surface risks early, and bring in other people when their input will improve the result.
- Strong written and spoken English and experience working independently in a remote, asynchronous team.
We care more about the quality and ownership of what you have built than a specific number of years, previous title, or exact match with our stack.
Nice to have
- Experience building developer tools, CI/CD systems, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products.
- Hands-on experience with distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
- Experience evolving a mature codebase while introducing a new product or architecture alongside it.
- Experience in a lean environment where senior engineers participate directly in product discovery and customer conversations.
What success looks like
Within your first three months:
- You have taken ownership of a meaningful product problem and shipped a useful capability to production.
- Your work shows good product taste, clear technical decisions, and disciplined scope.
- You have learned enough of Semaphore's existing platform to reuse its strengths and avoid unnecessary reinvention.
- You are using AI coding agents to increase your output while keeping the resulting systems understandable, tested, and reliable.
- Product and engineering decisions move faster because you bring clear options, make sound calls, and follow through.
- The team trusts you with an ambiguous new product or feature and expects you to drive it to a strong result.
How you will work
This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad ownership. You will work closely with engineering, product, infrastructure, and company leadership. Teams are small, communication is direct, and the person closest to the work is expected to exercise judgment.
You will have room to shape both the product and its implementation. In return, we expect you to take responsibility for the whole outcome: what gets built, why it matters, how well it works, and what happens after it ships.