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Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead – NetBox Delivery

AI Summary
NetBox Labs is hiring a Staff Software Engineer and technical lead to establish the technical direction for its new NetBox Delivery team. The role focuses on building and operating software that installs, upgrades, releases, and runs NetBox across Cloud and self-managed Enterprise deployments. The engineer will develop Kubernetes operators, controllers, internal APIs, release tooling, and production observability while contributing to NetBox core performance and reliability. This is a highly hands-on senior role with cross-functional architecture ownership, incident escalation responsibilities, mentoring, and RFC-driven collaboration across engineering teams. Strong Python, Kubernetes, SaaS, AWS, GitOps, Terraform, and observability expertise are central to success.
Remote from
USA
Salary
USD 220k–240k / yr
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
4 Dec 2026
Listing views
13
Application actions
1
Application toolkit

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Opportunity details

About this role.

NetBox Labs is seeking a Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead for NetBox Delivery, a new team in our Applications group.

NetBox is a product that reaches people in a few ways: our open source community runs NetBox OSS; commercial customers use NetBox Cloud (SaaS) or NetBox Enterprise (self-managed). NetBox Delivery owns everything between a NetBox Core release and a healthy, running instance on Cloud and Enterprise. We work closely with NetBox Core, the team that builds NetBox and its core plugins. We ship the software, keep an eye on it in production, and when something breaks, we fix it at the source rather than working around it.

As Tech Lead, you set the technical direction for NetBox Delivery and write much of its code. You bring strong software engineering skills, SaaS experience, and hands-on DevOps and Kubernetes skills. You will be one of the first engineers on this team and help shape how it works.

In this role you will:

  • Design and build the software that installs, upgrades, and runs NetBox, such as Kubernetes operators, controllers, internal APIs, and release tooling

  • Contribute to NetBox and its core plugins, in collaboration with NetBox Core, to make them faster and more reliable in production, from application startup to Postgres query performance

  • Build observability into the software the team owns, and set the team’s standards for testing, documentation, and SLOs

  • Own the technical direction and architecture for how NetBox is built, released, and run on Cloud and Enterprise, as the team’s primary technical decision maker

  • Lead and mentor the team’s engineers, including its SRE, through design and code review

  • Work with NetBox Core and the Cloud, Enterprise, and Foundations teams to define release contracts and drive cross-team changes through RFCs

  • Act as a technical escalation point during incidents and make sure postmortem actions get done

Requirements:

  • 7+ years of software development experience, including technical ownership of a production system or platform area

  • Strong Python skills and experience with production SaaS applications; Django and Postgres preferred

  • Experience building software on top of Kubernetes, such as operators, controllers, or deployment tooling, with a solid understanding of reconciliation loops, custom resources, and the Kubernetes API

  • Experience building observability into applications, including error reporting, distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging, with tools such as OpenTelemetry and Sentry

  • Hands-on experience with several tools in our delivery stack: AWS, Kubernetes and Helm, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD or FluxCD, Terraform, and Prometheus and Grafana

  • Experience leading engineering work without formal manager authority, including mentoring other engineers

  • Hands-on experience building inside an AI-augmented development harness, including Claude Code and the workflows that make agentic tooling reliable

  • A track record of making technical decisions under ambiguity and driving work across team boundaries, from writing the RFC to getting a cross-team migration done

Nice to haves:

  • Rust or Go programming experience

  • Production experience with Django and Postgres at scale, including schema design, migration risk, and query performance

  • Familiarity with the NetBox ecosystem or network automation

  • Experience working in a B2B software startup or high-growth organization

  • Open source contributions or project involvement

  • Experience with self-managed or on-premises delivery

  • Container build skills, including base image design and Python dependency management

  • Experience with supply chain security, such as vulnerability scanning, image signing and SOC 2 controls for build pipelines

About NetBox Labs:

NetBox Labs helps companies build and manage complex networks. We help customers accelerate network automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network automation community.

NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular network source of truth, and Orb, the next-generation open source network observability platform. Our products include NetBox Enterprise, a fully supported self-managed NetBox with advanced features, and NetBox Cloud, a secure, scalable, and reliable SaaS edition of NetBox.

NetBox powers thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital (formerly GGV), Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and Mango Capital.

Our culture and values:

  • We own and solve problems with high attention to detail.

  • Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community. When our community wins, we win.

  • We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity

  • Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly.

NetBox Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse teams build better software, and we welcome applicants of every race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, and veteran status. If you need accommodation at any point in the process, just let us know.

Apply now >

This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

5/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

5/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

5/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThis staff-level technical leadership role combines deep application engineering, Kubernetes delivery systems, production reliability, and architecture ownership. The successful candidate must make consequential decisions under ambiguity and align several teams without formal managerial authority.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Market rate
$230,000
US market range (per year)$210k–$270k
AI insightThe employer discloses a base salary range of $220,000–$240,000 USD per year, with a midpoint of $230,000. This is a credible annual range for a US-based staff-level software engineering technical lead with substantial Kubernetes, SaaS, and platform-delivery ownership; the estimated US market range is $210,000–$270,000 per year.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you design a Kubernetes operator for safely upgrading a stateful NetBox deployment?

I would define a clear custom resource representing the desired NetBox version and configuration, then implement an idempotent reconciliation loop that validates prerequisites, creates backups where appropriate, coordinates schema migrations, and advances through observable upgrade stages. I would include status conditions, rollback or stop-the-world safeguards for failed migrations, and metrics and events that make progress and failures actionable.

Describe how you would improve application observability for a SaaS platform running on Kubernetes.

I would establish consistent structured logging, service-level metrics, distributed tracing, error reporting, and dashboards tied to user-impacting SLOs. Instrumentation should cover request paths, background tasks, database calls, deployment events, and dependencies, with alerts based on error budgets and symptoms rather than only infrastructure saturation.

How do you make technical decisions across multiple engineering teams when requirements are ambiguous?

I start by documenting the problem, constraints, alternatives, risks, and proposed decision in an RFC. I seek input early from affected teams, make ownership and migration responsibilities explicit, and use measurable acceptance criteria so the decision can be implemented and evaluated consistently.

What practices would you use to make a Python/Django application more reliable at scale?

I would focus on safe schema migrations, efficient indexing and query patterns, background-job reliability, robust connection handling, and performance profiling of high-volume endpoints. I would also strengthen automated testing, deployment checks, tracing, and operational runbooks so regressions can be detected and resolved quickly.

How would you mentor engineers while remaining a hands-on technical lead?

I would set clear technical standards, use design and code reviews as teaching opportunities, and delegate meaningful ownership rather than only assigning isolated tasks. Regular technical pairing, written feedback, shared incident reviews, and transparent decision records help engineers grow while keeping the team aligned on quality and reliability.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
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