Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience and Reliability (AI-Native)

The short version

We're a six-person full-stack team (Go, React) building manufacturing execution software that runs on real factory floors. We're adding a seventh engineer whose focus is not the next feature ticket, but helping everything the team ships be correct, well-tested, and ready for customers, and making that faster over time.

This is not a QA role in the traditional sense. You won't sit downstream of the team clicking through release candidates. You'll be a peer engineer with the same technical bar as everyone else, reviewing code alongside the rest of the team before it merges, owning the release pipeline, and using AI and automation to replace the slow, manual parts of quality work with tooling everyone benefits from.

If you're a strong full-stack engineer who gets more satisfaction from finding the edge case nobody thought of, or from cutting a two-week release process down to two days, than from shipping the feature itself, this is the role.

We're a fully remote company with teammates spread across five-plus time zones, and we don't have project managers driving day-to-day progress. That shapes who thrives here: people who can take an ambiguous goal, decide what to do next, communicate clearly in writing, and keep moving without someone checking in. More on that below.

What you'll do

Review code as a core part of your job. PR review is our biggest bottleneck, and you'll add real capacity to it as one of the team's regular reviewers. You'll read Go and React code critically for correctness, edge cases, test coverage and test quality, and the failure modes that show up in production rather than in the happy path. Every engineer here still owns their own work and still reviews each other's code; you bring an additional, dedicated lens on quality, and your feedback lands while the code is still being written rather than after a release.

Own the release process end to end. You'll drive what "ready for customers" means and make sure we get there. That means working with product, customer success, and implementation teams to understand how customers actually use the product, translating that into test coverage and release criteria, and being the person who confidently says a release is good to go. You'll set the standard with the team, not for it: the best release process is one the whole team believes in and follows without being chased.

Build the tooling, don't be the tooling. Where quality work is manual today (regression testing, environment setup, release verification), your job is to automate it. You'll own our CI/CD pipelines, test infrastructure, and quality tooling, and you'll use AI aggressively: agent-driven test generation, AI-assisted code review, automated exploratory testing, and whatever else works. We expect you to evaluate what's real versus hype and build what actually moves the needle.

Support the team's projects rather than run your own. You'll be embedded in other engineers' work: pairing on test strategy early in a project, helping design for testability, flagging risk in design reviews, and stepping in on hard bugs. You'll write production code when it serves quality, reliability, or developer velocity, and occasionally pick up a feature ticket when the team needs it, but your default mode is force multiplier, not individual feature owner.

Raise the quality bar with the team, not over it. Over time, the team should get better at testing and reviewing because you're on it. You'll propose patterns, write the reference examples, and make the case for changes; when the team disagrees, you'll argue your position, then commit to the decision and make it work. This role succeeds through influence and trust, not authority.

What we're looking for

Must have

5+ years as a professional software engineer, with meaningful time as a full-stack developer. You've built and shipped production systems, not just tested them.

Strong enough in Go and modern React/TypeScript to review a senior engineer's PR and have your comments taken seriously. Deep experience in one and solid experience in the other is fine; you'll be reviewing both.

A track record of owning CI/CD and test infrastructure: designing test strategies, building automated test suites (unit, integration, end-to-end), and keeping pipelines fast and trustworthy.

Hands-on, current use of AI tools in your engineering workflow, and opinions about where they help and where they don't. You've used coding agents for more than autocomplete and can talk about what you've automated with them.

The instinct for what breaks. You think in edge cases, failure modes, and "what happens when the network drops halfway through this," and you can explain that risk to a non-engineer.

Comfort working directly with non-engineering stakeholders to define what "done and ready" actually means.

Clear, kind, and direct written communication. Most of your impact will land through PR comments, design feedback, and release notes, often read hours later by someone in a different time zone.

Self-direction. You can take a goal like "make releases boring," break it into work, decide what matters most, and make steady progress without a project manager setting the pace. When something is ambiguous, you ask a good question or make a reasonable call and move; you don't wait.

Team instincts. You can hold a strong opinion, make the case for it, hear the counterargument, and commit fully to whatever the team decides, including when it isn't your preference.

Nice to have

Experience with the operational side of software: observability, release management, on-prem or edge deployments, or hardware-adjacent systems.

Familiarity with manufacturing, industrial software, or other environments where downtime has a physical cost.

Experience with SOC 2, ITAR, or similar compliance requirements as they apply to release process.

Experience at a small company where you had to build process from scratch rather than inherit it.

Who this role is not for

We want to be upfront so we don't waste your time:

If you want to spend most of your week shipping your own features, this isn't the role. Your output is measured in the team's quality and velocity, not your ticket count.

If your QA experience is primarily manual test execution or test-case management without a strong engineering background, you'll find the review and tooling expectations a stretch.

If you see AI tooling as a threat to quality rather than a lever for it, we'll disagree on strategy from day one.

If you do your best work with a manager or PM setting daily priorities and checking in on progress, a fully remote, multi-time-zone team without that structure will feel like too little support rather than freedom.

Why this role matters here

Our software runs on factory floors. When it's wrong, production lines stall and real people feel it. We think the best way to protect quality is to build it in from the start: quality expertise in the design conversation, in the code review, and in the pipeline, rather than as a checkpoint at the end. This role exists to make that a permanent part of how the team works, and you'll have the autonomy and the mandate to shape it.

You'll join a small, senior team where your work is visible immediately and where the release process, test infrastructure, and quality practices are yours to shape together with the people who'll live with them.

How we work

Pico is fully remote, with teammates across five or more US and international time zones. In practice that means a lot of our collaboration is asynchronous and written: design docs, PR threads, and clear status updates carry more weight than meetings. We keep a small set of overlapping hours for the conversations that need to be live.

We don't have project managers on the engineering team. Priorities come from the team and from the company's goals, and each engineer is trusted to turn those into a plan, surface blockers early, and keep things moving. It's a lot of autonomy, and it works because everyone here takes ownership of both their own work and the team's shared outcomes.

About Pico MES

Pico MES builds manufacturing execution system software for modern factories, along with the on-site network appliances that connect it to the shop floor. We support customers in many industries, from consumer products, aerospace & defense, automotive and more.

Pico MES is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and don't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Because of ITAR requirements, this role is limited to US persons as defined by 22 CFR 120.62.