Head of Developer Experience

About the Role

Code Metal's forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) solve hard problems inside secure customer programs every day. Along the way, they invent tools, pipelines, and patterns that make our platform faster and more reliable. That field innovation is one of our richest sources of product value.

We're hiring a leader to capture that innovation and turn it into products that customer engineers can use on their own to automate software engineering with trust.

You'll own the developer experience, where engineers build, translate, verify, and review agent work, with FDEs as customer zero. You'll standardize what works, decide what becomes commercial product, prove it with design partners, and bring it to market.

The goal is to clear away the noise and bespoke work so FDEs and customer engineers can focus on the problems only they can solve. You'll report to the SVP, Head of Product. It's a builder's role: you'll set the strategy, build the team, and ship the first version alongside them.

Location: Remote (U.S.), with 25% travel.

Responsibilities

• Field-to-product engine: Treat FDEs as customer zero. Consolidate and standardize their tools and pipelines, capture repeatable patterns, and decide what becomes commercial product and what stays custom.
• Feedback from secure environments: Build a reliable way to bring product improvements back from air-gapped and secure deployments.
• Developer experience: Own strategy and roadmap for the interfaces where engineers build, translate, verify, and review agent work, and iterate on them directly.
• Repeatable results: Turn proven FDE workflows into interfaces, templates, skills, and guided flows, so the same inputs produce the same results whoever runs them.
• Trust and compliance: Surface lifecycle artifacts and auditable proof in the review workflow, and let customers encode their own standards, so engineers can trust the output and defend it.
• Design partners and value: Validate with 3-5 commercial engineering teams before broad launch, and instrument the adoption and ROI metrics leaders use to justify and expand their investment.
• Product storytelling: Create demos, videos, and presentations, and partner with Sales and Growth on packaging, positioning, and launches.
• Team: Help hire the growing product team, and lead and mentor PMs and design.

What Success Looks Like in Six Months

• FDE tooling consolidated into one instrumented internal release that FDEs use daily.
• A working path for product improvements from secure environments back to the core product.
• A measurable drop in custom code per project.
• New team members hired, onboarded, and shipping.
• 3-5 commercial, enterprise, and government design partners actively using Code Metal tools in a “self-service” manner.
• A first commercial release, with adoption and value metrics in place.

Requirements

• 10+ years in product, technical consulting, or solutions leadership and management
• A track record of building tools that make delivery teams faster, and turning services work into repeatable commercial products.
• P&L or revenue ownership for a product line.
• Hands-on depth in agentic developer tools and AI-assisted SDLC, including leading enterprise adoption of them.
• A track record of cutting through complexity to find simple, elegant product solutions.
• Product judgment to tell a one-off customer request from a repeatable product need, and the discipline to say no.
• Ability to ramp quickly into deep technical domains and earn credibility with engineers and technical founders.
• Strong writer and presenter who makes complex technical ideas clear for executives, engineers, and customers.
• Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance if required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Consulting or professional services background, especially building products alongside delivery teams.
• Experience building products for developers, engineers, or other highly technical users.
• Exposure to government, defense, or other regulated environments.
• A public body of work on AI adoption, agentic engineering, or software strategy.
• Experience mentoring product managers and building teams from scratch.

Benefits

• Pay depends on experience, but we strive to be at the upper end of the salary range
• Health care plan with 100% premium coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
• 401k with 5% matching
• Paid Time Off (uncapped vacation, plus sick and public holidays)
• Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement
• Relocation assistance for qualifying employees

Wage Transparency - The salary range for this role is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, as the final offer amount may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, individual proficiency, skills, experience, and location.