a16z Staff Engineer, GenAI Tooling & DevEx (R5469)
Summary
Builds and maintains GenAI-powered developer tools and automation to speed up software engineering workflows for a defense-tech company using C++, Python, and cloud infrastructure.
Job Description:
As a GenAI Tooling & Developer Experience Engineer on the HMS DevOps Team, you will design, develop, and maintain the GenAI tooling that accelerates the development velocity of your fellow software engineers. You will collaborate with robotics and autonomy software engineers to understand their workflows, remove friction, and enable effective GenAI-assisted development in both commercial and government environments while meeting requirements for secure, controlled data.
You will build the automation, infrastructure, and integration layers that make GenAI useful across the software engineering organization. You will streamline processes across GitLab, Jira, and Confluence so colleagues spend less time coordinating work and more time creating software. You will apply your expertise in C++, Python, build systems, and developer tooling to provide more power and context to our developers and GenAI tools.
This is a high-leverage role where your impact scales through the work of others: every improvement you make to GenAI tooling, automation, and developer workflows will help engineers across HMS move faster, work more securely, and spend more time solving the hardest robotics and autonomy problems.
What you'll do:
- Design, develop, and maintain GenAI-enabled developer tools for C++, Python, and Node.js software projects.
- Partner with robotics and autonomy engineers to identify high-friction workflows and convert them into secure, repeatable GenAI-assisted tooling.
- Extend our custom GenAI harness with Python or Bash tools, secure LLM routing, audited execution paths, and local containerized environments.
- Build integrations across GitLab, Jira, Confluence, and internal developer systems to provide GenAI tools with useful engineering context.
- Improve build, test, and developer-environment workflows, including GenAI-assisted adoption of reproducible Nix development environments.
- Support engineers adopting GenAI tooling through documentation, examples, troubleshooting, and feedback-driven improvements.
Required qualifications:
- Typically requires a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- Fluent with GenAI-assisted development. You can pair with AI tools to explore ideas, generate code, debug issues, and quickly turn rough concepts into working prototypes.
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered tools for software development.
- Direct experience writing scripts (Bash, Python) and utilizing webhooks/APIs to automate and integrate engineering tools (such as Jira, Confluence, and GitLab).
- Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker, multi-stage builds) and package managers (such as Conan, Poetry, or Nix).
- Familiarity with deploying and managing application workloads in cloud environments (such as Azure Gov Cloud or AWS).
- Experience with secure software development practices, secret management, and identity providers (Active Directory, Entra ID).
- Ability to obtain and maintain an active U.S. SECRET security clearance (U.S. citizenship required).
Preferred qualifications:
- Practical experience building, maintaining, and scaling enterprise CI/CD systems.
- Experience developing tools in CUI and ITAR environments.
- Expertise in tuning LLMs for specialized use
- Familiarity with deploying custom LLMs
Skills
As published by lever · 19 questions · 9 written answers
Basics
Resume/CV, Full name, Email, Phone, Current location, Current company, LinkedIn URL, Twitter URL, GitHub URL, Portfolio URL, Other website
Short answers (1)
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- Are you authorized to work in the United States?
- Will you require sponsorship for employment now or in the future?
- This position may require access to information and technology that is subject to export controls, such as EAR. Are you any of the following?
- Shield AI provides technology, services, and support to the United States military and allied forces with their various missions. If selected for employment with Shield AI, your contributions will directly relate to and/or support these missions. Are there any reasons why you would not be able to fully contribute in support of the U.S. military and allied forces?
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Written answers (9)
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