Developer Experience Engineer at Picogrid
El Segundo, CA
$170,000–$195,000
Jul 20, 2026
El Segundo, CA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A first-of-its-kind internal role focused on making engineers more productive: building and maintaining local development environments, CI/CD pipelines, repository templates, and automated security and compliance tooling. The work centers on measurable outcomes — reducing onboarding time, shortening CI runs, and eliminating flaky checks — and suits someone with a background in platform or tooling engineering who is comfortable shaping practices from scratch in a small team.
Mid level · 3+ years · Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA · Full-time
Pay in the description: $170,000–$195,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 90 people in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 25–170
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $164,459 (middle half $130,334–$195,752). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (11)
The role is titled 'Developer Experience Engineer' with no seniority level in the title, hence advertised seniority is Unspecified. The 3+ years requirement and scope (first DevEx hire at a startup, owning CI/CD and internal tooling) support a Mid-level classification; the scope is meaningful but not org-wide Staff/Principal.
GitHub Actions is listed as required with 'or similar CI platforms' — CircleCI, GitLab CI, and Jenkins are captured as alternatives. The specific sub-capabilities (reusable workflows, composite actions, caching, OIDC, action hygiene) are attributes of the skill, not separate tools.
Golang and Python are presented as interchangeable ('Golang or Python') in the required qualifications — emitted as one skill with Python as the alternative.
Terraform and OpenTofu are explicitly listed as interchangeable ('Terraform or OpenTofu') — emitted as one skill with OpenTofu as the alternative.
k3s, k3d, and docker-compose are listed together as local dev tooling examples ('tools such as'); k3s is the primary name with k3d and docker-compose as alternatives.
Secret scanning, dependency scanning, and container vulnerability scanning are listed together under a single required bullet; emitted as two distinct skills (secret scanning; container vulnerability scanning) plus static analysis, all required.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is listed under required qualifications alongside AI agent tooling experience; emitted as MCP since it is the specific named protocol/tool.
AWS (including GovCloud) and Backstage (developer portal) appear only under Preferred Qualifications — marked as preferred accordingly.
The posting mentions export control requirements (US persons only) but does not gate on a formal security clearance — the clearance requirement is None.
The office is in El Segundo, CA (Los Angeles metro); the posting mentions relocation assistance and in-office lunch, indicating this is primarily an in-person role — remote is false.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): static analysis.
Read the full posting
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