---
title: 'Staff Backend Engineer at Develocity'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-engineer-develocity-europe-a5r41d7de25v'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Staff Backend Engineer at Develocity

- **Company:** Develocity
- **Location:** Europe
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gradle/jobs/8158850

## Job description

## Who We Are

AI is changing how software gets built. Code production is becoming a commodity. The focus is shifting from writing code to specifying, orchestrating, verifying, and governing change – and the toolchain is the new constraint.

We are at the center of this shift. We build Develocity, a toolchain observability and intelligence platform used by some of the world's leading software organizations – Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify, SAP, major global banks, and hundreds more. Develocity helps software teams achieve delivery excellence through deep observability, build and test acceleration, and AI-powered intelligence across the entire toolchain – with support for Gradle Build Tool, Apache Maven™, sbt, npm, Python, and Bazel.

We are an AI-native company. AI is not a feature we're bolting on – it's central to how we work, how we think about our product, and where we're heading. Develocity encodes a decade of build and test expertise into a context engineering layer: the ground truth AI agents need to change code safely, and the governance to attribute and gate that change at machine speed. Trust, evidence, and explainability are at the core of everything we build.

We have partnered with the Apache Software Foundation, the Commonhaus Foundation, the Micronaut Foundation, and other OSS projects such as Spring, Quarkus, Kotlin, JUnit, AndroidX, and many more to bring the values of Develocity also to the OSS Community.

## Our Values

Seek to Understand: Everything starts with listening and understanding, and we strive to understand different viewpoints, problems, and motivations. Before we take action, we ensure we truly grasp the challenges, perspectives, and goals.

Know the Why: We approach our work with a clear sense of purpose, ensuring every step is deliberate and focused. We take meaningful action with urgency, but never at the expense of thoughtful consideration.

Innovate & Iterate: We embrace challenges and are not afraid to try new things, even if they might fail. With deep understanding and a clear purpose, we can develop creative and bold solutions to tackle challenges.

Own the Outcome: We are empowered to take initiative and we maintain transparency in our work and its outcomes. When we execute, we take responsibility for our decisions, measure the success of our innovations, and learn from the results.

## Who You Are

You're an experienced Staff Software Engineer and your adoption of AI has changed the scale of what you take on.

You've taken initiatives that were ambiguous at the start, created structure where none existed, and driven them across teams to completion. You use what you build, and push for everyone around you to do the same. You judge your work by how much value reaches customers and how quickly. You make consequential calls with pragmatism and without close guidance, and you bring stakeholders and leadership with you. That judgment covers product direction as much as technical aspects.

You have a strong record of delivering testable, evolvable, and scalable back-end architectures to production, and you thrive on the problems that come with them. You don't need to be a build expert, though you bring a deep understanding of and interest in the automation domain, as well as developer and AI agent productivity. You hold strong opinions, articulate them clearly, and change them when the evidence says so. Working in a distributed team suits you, and you can write concise documents that align everyone.

## Responsibilities

- Design, implement, test, deliver, and maintain Develocity features
- Own ambiguous initiatives, from discovery through production to proven impact
- Surface scope and delivery risk early across the initiatives you run, and drive the mitigation
- Write the discoveries and specifications that turn several teams' input into one coherent plan
- Set the standard in the day-to-day: the code you write, the reviews you give, and how you use AI
- Dogfood what you ship, and keep the practice strong across teams
- Work and communicate directly with customers on product discoveries and rollouts
- Participate in Develocity releases, in collaboration with the entire engineering team

## Minimum Qualifications

- Effective use of AI to ship quality software at high velocity
- In-depth experience with Java or another JVM language (our codebase is primarily Java)
- Experience leading complex features end-to-end and cross-team
- Proficiency in written and spoken English
- Self-motivated and self-managing, with excellent organizational skills

## Preferred Qualifications

- Building systems where AI agents are a primary consumer
- Working on developer tools
- Automating the software build and delivery process
- Working with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes
- Designing and scaling fault-tolerant, highly-available distributed systems

## What We Offer

- Opportunity to work on a widely-used product with a clear vision for the future
- Work on the problem AI created: verifying and governing change at machine scale
- Close customer interaction with engineers from leading tech organizations
- An automation-focused, test-driven engineering culture where working with frontier AI is the default
- Close collaboration with experienced and dedicated peer engineers
- Opportunities for growth in technical and leadership responsibilities
- In-person meetings, such as our annual company offsite and team meetings
- Work from home in a remote-first environment
- Competitive salaries and equity grants

Location

- Remote from Europe, with working conditions allowing seamless collaboration with your colleagues through email, chat, and video conferencing

## About Develocity

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Develocity, a product of Gradle Technologies, is a toolchain observability and acceleration platform that helps engineering teams build software faster, more reliably, and securely at scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2010 (Gradle Technologies)
- **Founders**: Hans Dockter

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE), DevOps, CI/CD, Software Build & Test Tooling
- **Target customers**: Enterprise engineering teams (B2B); customers include Netflix, LinkedIn, ASML, Airbnb, Microsoft, Nasdaq, SAP, and Tableau.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To help leading technology and business brands strengthen continuous delivery practices and achieve software delivery excellence.

## Products & Services
- **[Gradle Build Tool](https://gradle.com/)**: One of the most widely used build systems globally, and the primary build tool for Android developers. An open-source tool for automating software builds.
- **[Develocity](https://gradle.com/develocity/)**: The company’s flagship commercial product. It provides comprehensive observability, build and test acceleration technologies, and rapid troubleshooting features. Key features include:
    - **Build Scan**: Deep, shareable insights into every build.
    - **Analytics & Performance Insights**: AI-powered dashboards to identify bottlenecks.
    - **Flaky Test Detection**: Automatically identifies and manages unreliable tests.
    - **Failure Analytics**: Understands patterns in failures to prioritize fixes.
    - **Universal Cache**: Reuses build outputs across the organization to accelerate builds.
    - **Test Distribution**: Runs tests in parallel across distributed agents to shorten CI cycles.
    - **Predictive Test Selection**: Uses AI to run only tests relevant to code changes, cutting test cycles by up to 90%.
    - **Software Provenance & Policy Automation**: Ensures supply chain security and governance (Continuous GRC).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Develocity saves Netflix over 280,000 hours per year with faster builds and tests. The company reports a 60% reduction in total serial test execution time for its customers. Gradle Build Tool surpasses 60 million downloads per month.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Partners include the Apache Software Foundation, Bazel, and the Commonhaus Foundation. They are a Platinum Sponsor and Infrastructure Services provider for the Apache Software Foundation.
- **Growth Signals**: The company is expanding Develocity support to a diverse toolchain landscape (Maven, sbt, npm, Python). They pioneered the Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) category and established the DPE Summit conference. Their focus on solving the challenges introduced by AI-driven development positions them for strong growth.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Category Creator**: Pioneered the Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) category, treating developer productivity as a toolchain challenge, not a people problem.
- **Massive Adoption**: Gradle Build Tool is a de facto standard for Android development and is used by millions of developers.
- **High Switching Costs**: Deep integration into customers' build pipelines and CI/CD systems creates a strong, sticky product. They boast an industry-leading renewal rate.
- **Open Source Roots**: Deep commitment to the open-source community (contributing to over 50 projects) builds trust and ensures a broad ecosystem of users and contributors.
- **AI-Native Strategy**: The product is specifically designed to handle the scale and complexity of AI-generated code, making it a critical tool for modern development teams.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-Driven Development**: The company's current focus is on preparing continuous delivery pipelines for the scale of AI-driven development. They are building features to manage the larger batch sizes, slower feedback loops, and rising infrastructure costs that come with GenAI code.
- **Toolchain Expansion**: Expanding Develocity's support beyond Gradle and Maven to include other major build systems like sbt, npm, and Python.
- **Security & Governance**: Integrating supply chain security and governance (Continuous GRC) directly into the developer toolchain, turning Develocity into a security and compliance platform for DevOps.
- **Community Building**: Deepening ties with the open-source community and growing the DPE Summit conference to establish thought leadership.

## Why Work Here
- **Fully Remote, Truly Global**: Gradle Technologies was founded as a remote-first organization. Employees can live and work from anywhere, with a strong emphasis on asynchronous, clear written communication.
- **Autonomy & Trust**: The culture empowers employees to own their work and deliver results, trusting their expertise.
- **Strong Community**: Despite being remote, the company fosters connection through virtual events, regular check-ins, and an annual in-person global team meeting (Gradle World Meeting). Individual teams also meet once a year.
- **Competitive Compensation**: Offers competitive salaries based on geographical location, company stock option plans for all team members, and benefits tailored to the employee's country of work.
- **Learning & Development**: Provides an annual learning and development stipend and a monthly meeting-free day dedicated to learning.
- **Perks**: Home office stipend, 8 hours of paid volunteer time per year, and international benefits.
- **Impactful Work**: Employees work on a product that meaningfully improves the experience of millions of developers worldwide, including at top tech companies and major open-source foundations.

## Sources
1. [gradle.com](https://gradle.com/)
2. [gradle.com - About Us](https://gradle.com/about-us/)
3. [gradle.com - Develocity](https://gradle.com/develocity/)
4. [gradle.com - Careers](https://gradle.com/careers/)
5. [LinkedIn - Gradle Technologies](https://www.linkedin.com/company/gradle-technologies)

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