Software Development Manager Jobs in Lafayette, CA

Job Summary

We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to own the inner loop of our developer platform — the scaffolding, environment bootstrap, and shared library systems that determine how fast and confidently engineers go from idea to first commit. This role is foundational: the composable scaffolding engine, declarative service schemas, and template lifecycle systems you build will directly determine whether developers experience a golden path or a maze of tribal knowledge and configuration drift.

You will design and ship opinionated, production-grade tooling that generates repositories, CI pipelines, baseline tests, and infrastructure hooks from a single schema declaration — and maintain those templates safely over time as the platform evolves. This is not a role for someone who has used golden-path systems; it's for someone who has built and operated them at scale.

Responsibilities

Composable Scaffolding Engine

• Design and build the engine that generates repositories, CI/CD pipelines, baseline tests, configuration, and platform integrations from declarative service schemas with opinionated defaults and extensibility hooks

• Own the full scaffolding surface: repo generator, CI/CD pipeline generator, config manager, secrets/env var wiring, and integration layer into GitHub and cloud providers

• Ensure generated scaffolds are immediately functional — wired to CI, observability, and infra hooks from day one, with no blank-page setup required

Declarative Service & Workload Schemas

• Define and maintain the schema specification that captures application type, runtime, dependencies, testing defaults, and infrastructure intent in a standardized, versioned format

• Build validation tooling (CLI and CI-integrated) to enforce schema correctness and surface errors early

• Reduce time-to-first-commit from the current 18–40 day range to under one week

Template Lifecycle Management

• Build the versioning, validation, and upgrade system that evolves scaffolds over time while preserving backward compatibility for downstream projects

• Implement three-way merge logic (template old → template new → customized service) with rollback safety and customization detection so teams can adopt template updates without breaking builds

Local Dev & Environment Bootstrap

• Build and maintain standardized local and ephemeral development environment descriptors (devcontainers, Docker Compose, golden images) with parity validation against CI and target runtimes

• Implement environment automation: just-in-time provisioning triggered by pull request, configuration injection for secrets and service discovery, and tear-down automation

• Implement environment health and drift detection to catch "works on my machine" failures before they reach CI

Reusable Shared Libraries

• Build and maintain versioned shared libraries for cross-cutting concerns — logging, encryption, auto-configuration, trace propagation, and Docker base images — as consumable, consistent building blocks for all application teams

• Ensure libraries are secure from inception and reduce fragmentation in security posture and reliability across the service ecosystem

Technical 

• Production experience building developer platform tooling — repo generators, CI/CD scaffolding frameworks, devcontainer or ephemeral environment automation — not just consuming them

• Strong in Go or Python; deep fluency with GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipeline generation and automation

• Hands-on Terraform experience for infrastructure generation and self-service provisioning patterns

• Experience with OPA or equivalent policy-as-code engines integrated into build and deploy workflows

• Strong understanding of container runtimes, base image management, and environment parity patterns (devcontainers, Docker Compose, Kubernetes)

• Experience designing and maintaining template lifecycle systems: versioning, migration paths, backward compatibility, rollback safety

• Familiarity with schema validation tooling and CLI-first developer experience design

• Comfortable working across the stack from schema design through to CI integration and portal plugin surfaces

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a platform engineering or developer experience role at a mid-to-large engineering organization

• Has designed and operated opinionated golden-path systems at scale — the kind that hundreds of engineers depend on daily. Background from companies with strong platform cultures (e.g., Spotify, Netflix, Stripe, Uber, Airbnb) is strongly preferred

• Track record of reducing developer toil through automation, not just documentation or guidelines

• Strong written communication skills — this role produces tooling that must be self-explanatory, and documentation is part of the deliverable

• Able to work cross-functionally with security, CI/CD, and application engineering teams to align on standards without creating bottlenecks

• Experience with Backstage or similar developer portal frameworks is a plus

• Familiarity with enterprise compliance requirements (audit trails, change evidence, vulnerability scanning integration) is a plus