Expert Developer Experience Engineer

Description:

BAE Systems One Arc is seeking an experienced Expert(Senior) Developer Experience Engineer to join the Engineering department. This role is dedicated to shaping and advancing the developer experience strategy across the organization by architecting reliable, scalable, and high-performance systems, tools, and practices that enable engineering teams to deliver complex products with efficiency and confidence.

Developer Experience at One Arc focuses on ensuring that build, test, and release workflows are smooth, predictable, and scalable. By improving the underlying engineering ecosystem, this role helps reduce friction in day-to-day development, shortens feedback cycles, and supports higher product quality across flagship programs. The function plays a key part in fostering engineering productivity, operational consistency, and continuous improvement throughout the software lifecycle.

As a key technical leader within the Engineering department, the Expert Developer Experience Engineer is responsible for fostering engineering excellence, providing direction across multiple teams, and guiding the adoption of industry best practices. Through technical leadership, mentorship, and close collaboration with engineering, QA, operations, and security teams, this role helps maintain a mature, well-optimized development environment that empowers engineers to innovate effectively and ensures the organization’s capability to deliver secure, high-integrity solutions at scale.

Key Areas of Responsibility:

Tooling & Internal Developer Platform Ownership

Architect, evolve, and govern the internal developer platform and core development tools to support large-scale, multi-team engineering environments

Define long-term tooling strategy, ensuring systems are resilient, scalable, and aligned with organizational and product roadmaps

Establish standards for documentation, workflows, templates, and automation patterns, and oversee their adoption across teams

Developer Productivity & Workflow Optimization

Lead initiatives to significantly improve developer efficiency, reduce friction, and optimize end-to-end development workflows

Conduct deep analysis of systemic bottlenecks and design comprehensive solutions that materially increase engineering velocity

Drive the adoption of advanced automation, build optimization techniques, and innovative workflow improvements across the organization

Cross-Team Collaboration & Technical Enablement

Serve as a key technical leader collaborating with development, QA, operations, and security teams to shape engineering processes and tooling direction

Provide mentorship, technical guidance, and architectural insight to junior and mid-level engineers, promoting a high standard of engineering excellence

Lead cross-functional initiatives to align tooling improvements, workflow changes, and platform evolution with organizational priorities

CI/CD Pipeline Quality, Reliability & Scalability

Architect, modernize, and oversee large-scale CI/CD pipelines supporting complex products, distributed teams, and mission-critical software

Lead resolution of the most complex pipeline failures, implement long-term stability strategies, and ensure pipelines are scalable and highly available

Set technical direction for build and release automation, establishing best practices and ensuring consistent implementation across teams

Pipeline Observability, Monitoring & Performance

Design and implement comprehensive observability frameworks, including advanced dashboards, telemetry, analytics, and proactive alerting, tailored for build and CI/CD systems

Conduct system-wide performance analysis, identify architectural weaknesses, and lead efforts to optimize build speeds, resource consumption, and pipeline throughput

Establish standards for ongoing monitoring, behavior modeling, and performance baselining for all build workflows

Security & Compliance in Build and Release Automation

Define and champion secure-by-design practices for all build, testing, and release automation systems

Architect and implement advanced security controls, including zero-trust CI/CD patterns, supply chain integrity validation, and automated compliance enforcement

Collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed organizational and industry standards deeply within CI/CD processes

Technical Leadership, Strategy & Organizational Impact

Influence long-term DevEx strategy, identifying opportunities to modernize tooling, adopt emerging technologies, and elevate engineering capabilities

Lead high-impact technical initiatives that span multiple teams, products, or departments, ensuring alignment with business and technology objectives

Advocate for engineering productivity, developer experience, and build/release excellence at the organizational level

Objectives:

Developer Experience

Build and maintain the most efficient, reliable, and developer-friendly environment for product development

Provide practical solutions to developers’ day-to-day challenges and workflow issues

Design, maintain, and improve automated and resilient build systems

Offer guidance and consultation on build performance, CI/CD workflows, and product-related development issues

Release Engineering

Develop platforms and tools that make product release processes simple, safe, and efficient

Implement and maintain fully automated, reliable release pipelines

Enable teams to deploy products seamlessly to customer workstations and production environments

Ensure secure, consistent, and safe delivery of product builds to customers

Skills:

Scripting & Automation

Advanced proficiency in multiple scripting languages (Python, PowerShell, Bash), with the ability to architect complex automation systems

Experience designing scalable automation frameworks, reusable modules, and robust tooling used across multiple teams or products

Strong capability to diagnose and resolve sophisticated automation issues, and to set standards for automation best practices

Version Control Systems

Expert understanding of version control methodologies, large-scale branching strategies, and enterprise repository management

Experience designing or administering complex VCS infrastructures (GitLab, GitHub Enterprise, Perforce, SVN) for multi-team environments

Ability to define and enforce version control workflows that support reliable releases and maintain high code quality

Build Systems & CI/CD Pipelines

Proven experience architecting and scaling enterprise-level CI/CD systems using GitLab CI, Jenkins, Bamboo, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms

Strong capability to diagnose systemic pipeline issues, optimize performance, implement advanced automation patterns, and ensure robust end-to-end reliability

Experience setting CI/CD best practices and guiding engineering teams in adopting modern build and release methodologies

Virtualization & Environments

Deep expertise with virtualization platforms (VMware, Proxmox, VirtualBox) and complex environment lifecycle management

Ability to design reproducible, automated build/test environments using infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Ansible)

Experience optimizing environment provisioning, resource utilization, and environment reliability at scale

Containerization & Orchestration

Advanced proficiency with Docker and containerized build/test workflows, including designing secure, efficient, and optimized images

Experience integrating containers deeply into CI/CD pipelines and debugging complex container-related build issues

Familiarity with container orchestration systems (Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad) and using them to support scalable build/test automation is a strong plus

Observability & Monitoring

Expertise designing advanced dashboards, alerting systems, and telemetry pipelines (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Datadog) tailored for CI/CD and DevEx systems

Ability to analyze trends, model system behavior, forecast scaling needs, and lead investigations into systemic performance issues

Experience defining observability standards adopted across teams

Security & Compliance in Build Systems

Deep understanding of secure CI/CD architecture, including secret management, artifact integrity, dependency scanning, and secure build pipelines

Experience integrating organization-wide security and compliance controls into build/release pipelines and ensuring long-term adherence

Ability to identify structural security risks in developer workflows and develop sustainable mitigation strategies

Technical Leadership & Cross-Team Influence

Demonstrated ability to mentor and guide mid-level and junior engineers, driving skill growth and technical maturity

Experience leading cross-team initiatives, shaping organizational DevEx strategy, and promoting best practices across engineering departments

Ability to influence architectural direction and collaborate effectively with stakeholders across engineering, QA, operations, and security

Education and Experience:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field; equivalent professional experience with a strong technical track record is fully acceptable

Extensive hands-on experience architecting, maintaining, and scaling CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and developer tooling in complex, multi-team or enterprise environments

Demonstrated impact in leading Developer Experience, DevOps, or platform engineering initiatives, driving measurable improvements in engineering productivity, workflow efficiency, or release reliability

Strong experience with system observability and performance engineering, including designing logging, monitoring, and alerting strategies and leading investigations into systemic performance issues

Proven experience developing advanced automation frameworks, integrating automated test systems into CI/CD pipelines, and improving automation quality at scale

Track record of cross-functional technical leadership, working closely with development, QA, operations, and security teams to align tooling, workflows, and platform strategy with organizational needs

Demonstrated ability to mentor and guide junior and mid-level engineers, elevate team capability, and contribute to establishing engineering best practices

Experience working in environments where security, compliance, and software supply-chain integrity are critical considerations—preferably implementing or designing secure CI/CD patterns

Additional Attributes:

Must have:

Strategic, innovation-driven mindset, capable of identifying systemic workflow inefficiencies, defining long-term solutions, and driving organization-wide improvements to developer experience

Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to diagnose deeply complex build, pipeline, or infrastructure issues and deliver robust, sustainable, and scalable resolutions

Demonstrated technical ownership, with end-to-end responsibility for the health, performance, and evolution of build systems, CI/CD pipelines, and core developer tooling

Strong technical leadership abilities, including guiding cross-functional engineering initiatives, influencing architectural decisions, and setting standards for DevEx best practices

Advanced communication and stakeholder management skills, able to articulate technical strategies, justify design decisions, and align multiple teams around shared goals

High degree of autonomy, capable of leading initiatives, managing prioritization across competing needs, and driving improvements without supervision

Commitment to collaborative engineering culture, fostering knowledge sharing, mentoring team members, and elevating the overall DevEx maturity across the organization

Nice to have:

Experience designing or integrating advanced automation testing frameworks, optimizing test execution within CI/CD pipelines, and improving test reliability at scale

Strong familiarity with DevOps and platform engineering practices, such as infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, immutable infrastructure, or cloud-native build workflows

Experience leveraging or designing workflows within JIRA or other ticketing/issue-tracking systems, including workflow automation, dashboards, and process improvements

Hands-on experience with enterprise observability platforms (Grafana, ELK/EFK, Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch) used for monitoring pipeline performance, build health, and system reliability

Experience producing high-quality technical documentation, architectural proposals, migration guides, or internal onboarding materials for build and platform tooling

Knowledge of advanced CI/CD security and software supply chain integrity, including secret management architectures, provenance verification, artifact signing, and integrating compliance automation

Background contributing to large-scale modernization initiatives, such as migrating legacy build systems, consolidating tooling, or adopting cloud-native or container-based build workflows

Travel:

Hybrid Model (3 days in office | 2 days home office – can be subject of discussion)