Senior Software Engineer (Developer Experience)

Think about the last time you tried to book a tennis court. Or sign your kid up for a swim lesson. Or find an open rec league that actually fits your schedule. You probably ended up on a website that looked like it was built in 2003 — or god forbid, filled out a piece of paper.

$3T is spent on recreation globally, and it's built on a completely fragmented system that's largely untouched by technology.

At Rec (recreation.ai), we're using AI to change that — reimagining how the world plays, participates in community, and gets active. Our vision is simple: more recreation for everyone. We sit at a rare intersection — a consumer product loved by everyday players and an enterprise platform trusted by the organizations that power recreation.

We're a small team with firepower. Our founders were among the first few hundred at Uber, then led teams at The Athletic and MasterClass. The rest of the team combines builders from Google, Microsoft, Strava, Hipcamp, and Airbnb.

People join Rec for two reasons: you want to build AI that gets people back in the real world, and you want to work with really smart people.

This is not a seat-filling role. We're a Series A company in scaling mode, shipping more code every week, and the systems that let us ship quickly and confidently need someone who owns them.

That's this role. You'll own the tools, workflows, and guardrails that let every engineer at Rec move fast without breaking things. CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, end-to-end test coverage, local development environments, data snapshots, package upgrades, the infrastructure of engineering itself. When we ship a regression, it's your systems that should have caught it. When onboarding a new engineer takes a day instead of a week, it's your work that made the difference.

You'll work closely with our Infrastructure engineer on the foundation, and with every product engineer on the team to understand where the friction lives and how to remove it. You'll still contribute to product code when the work crosses into your domain, but the primary job is making the whole engineering org faster and more reliable.

• Own our CI/CD pipelines. Make builds fast, reliable, and easy to debug. Every minute saved compounds across the team.

• Build out automated testing and end-to-end test coverage. Design the quality safeguards that catch regressions before they reach production.

• Maintain and improve local development environments. New engineers should be productive on day one, and existing engineers shouldn't lose a morning to environment drift.

• Manage data snapshots and seed data for local and staging environments. Realistic data makes realistic testing.

• Drive package upgrades, dependency hygiene, and the unglamorous work that keeps the platform from rotting.

• Partner with the Infrastructure engineer on the shared foundation, and with product engineers to understand where friction slows them down.

• Use AI tools fluently to accelerate this work, from generating test coverage to automating upgrade PRs to analyzing CI flakiness. This role has real room to push what's possible with AI-assisted tooling.

• Contribute to product code when the work touches developer experience.

• 5+ years of experience building software in collaborative environments, with meaningful time spent on developer tooling, testing infrastructure, or CI/CD.

• You're fired up by the mission.

• AI fluency is non-negotiable.

• Deep experience with CI/CD systems. You know what makes a pipeline fast, what makes it flaky, and how to tell the difference. You've debugged the weird cases.

• You think about testing as a product. Test infrastructure is a deliverable, not an afterthought. You care about coverage, but you care more about whether the tests actually catch real bugs.

• You reduce friction where others accept it. You notice the slow build, the flaky test, the painful local setup, the package that's three major versions behind. And you fix it.

• You ship with quality.

• You thrive in ambiguity.

• You work like a partner, not just a coder.

• You communicate clearly, candidly, and constructively.

• Frontend: Next.js (hosted on Vercel), React, TypeScript

• Backend: Node.js, Koa, Objection.js, PostgreSQL

• Infra & Ops: AWS, Temporal, Twilio

• Where you'll spend most of your time: CI/CD systems, testing frameworks and end-to-end tooling, local development and staging environments, and the AI tooling that accelerates all of it.

• AI & Tooling: AI proficiency is mandatory here, not optional. Every engineer uses AI tools daily. We expect you to already be fluent with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent.

• Be Relentless. Move fast. Own it. Ship real value early and often.

• Win Together. Speak up, go beyond the boundaries of your role. That's how we win.

• Take Pride. Treat this like it's yours — because it is.

• Compensation: $150,000–$200,000 base + meaningful equity (final offer will be based on your background, experience and skillset)

• Benefits: Flexible PTO, top-tier health/dental/vision, and a 401(k) plan to support your future.

• Work location: San Francisco — in-office most days at our downtown SF office.