Senior Product Engineer

About Semaphore: Semaphore is a remote-first software company building continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) products for engineering teams. Their customers rely on Semaphore Cloud and self-hosted enterprise products to build, test, and deliver software securely and reliably. The company has extensive experience building developer infrastructure at scale and is now creating new products and capabilities for a world increasingly built by people working with AI coding agents. About the role: The Senior Product Engineer will take important ideas from early, ambiguous problems to useful products running in production. The role involves working across product and engineering boundaries: understanding users, shaping solutions, making technical decisions, building systems, and improving them based on real use. Responsibilities include extending mature Semaphore products and starting small experiments or new products. The focus is on achieving strong outcomes rather than completing predefined tickets. AI coding agents are integrated into daily workflows and expected to be used fluently to explore, build, test, and ship faster. The role requires accountability for choosing the right problems, setting direction, making trade-offs, reviewing outputs, and ensuring coherence, reliability, and maintainability. Strong ownership, initiative, taste, and judgment are essential, with comfort moving between product questions, system design, code, infrastructure, and user experience. What you will own: — Take product ideas from problem definition through design, implementation, rollout, and iteration, including experiments that may grow into standalone products. — Work directly with users and internal stakeholders to identify real problems, decide what is worth building, and make pragmatic scope and architecture decisions. — Build across backend services, APIs, infrastructure-facing components, and focused frontend experiences, reusing proven Semaphore systems before introducing new infrastructure. — Use AI coding agents effectively while maintaining high standards for correctness, security, clarity, and product quality. — Own the production outcome, including reliability, observability, supportability, and compliance with Semaphore's security requirements. — Communicate decisions, progress, and risks clearly. What we are looking for: — Proven track record of independently shipping meaningful software products or major product capabilities. — Strong product judgment to identify essential user problems, reduce unnecessary scope, and recognize when an experience is ready to ship. — Strong engineering judgment in system design, implementation, reliability, and maintainability. — Strong backend and systems fundamentals including APIs, asynchronous processing, service boundaries, state and lifecycle management, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery. — Comfort with infrastructure concepts such as virtual machines, storage, networking, authentication, secrets, containers, and cloud platforms. — Ability to navigate a polyglot environment; Semaphore systems include Go, Elixir, Ruby, React, and related technologies, though expertise in every language is not required. — Enough frontend capability to build or extend focused product user experiences without relying on a separate team. — Fluency with modern AI-assisted development including decomposing work for agents, supplying useful context, reviewing generated changes, and building verification into workflows. — Initiative and persistence, ability to make progress with incomplete information, surface risks early, and involve others when needed. — Strong written and spoken English and experience working independently in a remote, asynchronous team. — Emphasis on quality and ownership over years of experience or exact stack match. Nice to have: — Experience building developer tools, CI/CD systems, cloud platforms, or infrastructure products. — Hands-on experience with distributed systems and event-driven architectures. — Experience evolving a mature codebase while introducing new products or architectures. — Experience in lean environments where senior engineers participate directly in product discovery and customer conversations. What success looks like within first three months: — Ownership of a meaningful product problem and shipping a useful capability to production. — Demonstrated good product taste, clear technical decisions, and disciplined scope. — Learning enough of Semaphore's platform to reuse strengths and avoid unnecessary reinvention. — Using AI coding agents to increase output while maintaining understandable, tested, and reliable systems. — Faster product and engineering decisions due to clear options, sound calls, and follow-through. — Gaining team trust to drive ambiguous new products or features to strong results. How you will work: — Senior individual contributor role with broad ownership. — Close collaboration with engineering, product, infrastructure, and company leadership. — Small teams with direct communication and expectation of exercising judgment. — Opportunity to shape both product and implementation. — Responsibility for the whole outcome: what gets built, why it matters, how well it works, and post-shipment results.