Staff Software Engineer, Quality and Release Platform

About Us dbt Labs is the pioneer of analytics engineering, helping data teams transform raw data into reliable, actionable insights. Since 2016, we’ve grown from an open source project into the leading analytics engineering platform, now used by over 90,000 teams every week, driving data transformations and AI use cases. As of February 2025, we’ve surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and serve more than 5,400 dbt Platform customers, including AstraZeneca, Sky, Nasdaq, Volvo, JetBlue, and SafetyCulture. We’re backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter. At our core, we believe in empowering data practitioners: Reliable, high-quality data is the fuel that propels AI-powered data engineering. AI is changing data work, fast. dbt’s data control plane keeps data engineers ahead of that curve. We empower engineers to deliver reliable, governed data faster, cheaper, and at scale. dbt Labs is now synonymous with analytics engineering, defining the modern data stack and serving as the data control plane for enterprise teams around the world. And we’re just getting started.. We’re growing fast and building a team of passionate, curious people across the globe. Learn more about what makes us special by checking out our values . We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Quality and Release Platform (QARP) team and lead the technical direction of the platforms that power how dbt Labs builds, tests, and ships software. Our mission spans two critical areas: release engineering — making it easy for engineers to ship changes quickly, safely, and reliably — and code quality — building a platform that raises the bar for code quality across all of dbt Labs engineering. You'll work with tools like Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform, Python, GitHub Actions, and Kargo to architect and scale our deployment systems, while also helping design and build the tooling, frameworks, and automation that enable engineering teams to consistently produce high-quality code. This is a high-impact, staff-level role where you'll set architectural direction, mentor engineers, and drive initiatives that improve developer velocity, code quality, and reliability across the entire engineering organization. You'll also serve as a thought leader in engineering's internal AI strategy — helping define how we enable developers to leverage AI tools to write better code, ship faster, and work smarter. In this role, you can expect to: Define and drive the technical strategy and architecture for our CI/CD platform, release management systems, and code quality platform. Design and build tooling, frameworks, and automation that help engineering teams maintain and improve code quality across the organization. Lead high-impact initiatives that improve automation, observability, and self-service capabilities for engineers across the organization. Mentor and level up other engineers on the team, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement. Collaborate across teams and with engineering leadership to identify systemic challenges in our delivery and quality processes and architect solutions to address them. Evolve our release architecture to support dbt Cloud's multi-cloud, cell-based infrastructure at scale. Establish best practices and standards for build pipelines, release workflows, code quality, and infrastructure-as-code that are adopted across engineering. Serve as a thought leader in engineering's internal AI strategy — evaluating AI-assisted development tools, defining adoption practices and guardrails, and enabling developers to use AI effectively across the org. You are a good fit if you have: 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in platform, infrastructure, release engineering, or developer tooling. A track record of leading technical strategy and architecture for complex, production-scale CI/CD, code quality, or platfor ... (truncated, view full listing at source)