Principal Engineer (JetBrains Cloud Platform, Developer Experience)

At JetBrains, code is our passion. Ever since we started, back in 2000, we have strived to make the strongest, most effective developer tools on earth. By automating routine checks and corrections, our tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover, and create.

About the Initiative

JetBrains is evolving beyond standalone developer tools toward a unified, AI-native platform for software development.

AI is no longer just an assistant inside the editor – it is becoming an active participant in how software is planned, built, reviewed, and operated across teams and organizations. This shift introduces new challenges that cannot be solved at the level of individual tools alone: governance, security, cost control, observability, and coordinated work between humans and autonomous agents.

Our goal is to build a platform that enables companies to adopt AI in software development in a structured, scalable, and economically efficient manner – without locking them into closed ecosystems.

We are building the foundation that connects developer workflows, team-level collaboration, and organizational control into a single coherent system.

This platform will serve as the execution and governance layer for AI-driven development, deeply integrated with developer tools but designed to work across teams, products, and environments.

This is a long-term strategic investment for JetBrains and a key pillar of our vision for the future of software development.

The role

We are looking for a Principal Engineer (JetBrains Cloud Platform, Developer Experience) to drive large-scale improvements to the development experience across the JCP.

This role focuses on making JCP engineers faster and more productive by improving build systems, CI/CD pipelines, local development workflows, tooling infrastructure, and AI pipelines. You will own the developer experience end to end – from how engineers develop, build, and test locally to how code moves through CI and reaches production. As this is a rapidly growing platform, many workflows and processes are still maturing. You will define what a great development experience looks like and drive the organization toward it.

As part of the team, you will:

- Own and drive the strategy for developer experience improvements across the entire JCP platform.

- Optimize build systems (Gradle, Nx, and others) for faster builds, better caching, and reliable reproducibility at scale.

- Set up AI development pipelines, managing context, agents, and handoffs, and leveraging tools developed within the JCP.

- Improve CI/CD pipelines – reduce build times, increase reliability, optimize resource usage, and shorten feedback loops across TeamCity and GitHub.

- Improve containerized development workflows (Docker, Dev Containers) to ensure fast and consistent local environments.

- Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the development cycle – from code commit to production deployment.

- Establish best practices, tooling standards, and shared infrastructure that enable all teams to move faster.

- Collaborate with platform and product teams to understand pain points and deliver high-impact improvements.

We are looking for someone who:

- Has extensive experience with build systems (Gradle, Maven, or Bazel) and a track record of optimizing them at scale.

- Has strong expertise in CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Jenkins, or similar) and knows how to ensure high performance and reliability.

- Has hands-on experience with Docker and containerized development workflows.

- Understands the full software development life cycle and can reason about developer productivity holistically.

- Is able to drive cross-team initiatives and influence engineering practices across a large organization.

- Is motivated by making other engineers more productive and removing friction from their daily work.

We'd be particularly thrilled if you:

- Have experience improving the developer experience at scale in a platform or infrastructure organization.

- Have worked on AI-driven development pipelines.

- Have expertise in build caching, remote execution, and incremental build strategies.

- Have contributed to or maintained open-source build tooling or CI/CD infrastructure.

- Enjoy digging into performance problems and turning slow, flaky processes into fast, reliable ones.

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