Staff Product Engineer, Developer Experience

About Ancestry:

When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. Ancestry®, the global leader in family history, connects everyone with their past so they can discover, preserve, and share their unique family stories. With our unparalleled collection of more than 65 billion records, over 3.5 million subscribers, and over 27 million people in our growing DNA network, customers can discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Over the past 40 years, we’ve built trusted relationships with millions of people who have chosen us as the platform for discovering, preserving, and sharing the most important information about themselves and their families.
We are committed to our location flexible work approach, allowing you to choose to work in the nearest office, from your home, or a hybrid of both (subject to location restrictions and roles that are required to be in the office- see the full list of eligible US locations HERE). We will continue to hire and promote beyond the boundaries of our office locations, to enable broadened possibilities for employee diversity.
Together, we work every day to foster a work environment that's inclusive as well as diverse, and where our people can be themselves. Every idea and perspective is valued so that our products and services reflect the global and diverse clients we serve. 
Ancestry encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, protected veterans and all other qualified applicants. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? Join the curious.

Engineering Productivity owns how software gets made at Ancestry. We run the CI/CD platform that every service ships through, and we own the tools where the work happens day-to-day: GitHub, Harness, Jira, Confluence, and Figma. On top of those, we build our own platforms, including internal services for cost governance, developer metadata, and entity APIs, and CLI tooling that puts AI agents into everyday engineering workflows.

Our customers are the engineers, product managers, and designers of Ancestry. The time we save shows up in the output of every product team. Nobody is required to use what we build, so adoption has to be earned.

This is a product role that ships code. You will own one part of the developer experience, usually a specific workflow, tool, or user problem, and carry it from the first conversation through adoption. Within what you own, you are the product manager, designer, and engineer. You talk to users, decide which problem to take on next, choose the shape of the solution, build it, launch it, and find out whether it helped. Your manager, architect, and the team set portfolio priorities and define where your ownership begins and ends. Inside those boundaries, nobody hands you a groomed backlog or a finished mock.

The work mixes zero-to-one product building with applied AI. One project might be a CLI that makes a painful release workflow easy to follow. Another might be an agent that triages and drafts work during software delivery, with the evaluation and review points that make it safe to depend on. The right answer might be a small automation, a polished product surface, an agent, or no new tool at all. Deciding which, then shipping the smallest useful version, is your call.

We want someone opinionated about craft in internal tools, specifically. Internal software is usually held to a lower standard than customer-facing work. It should embarrass us when a tool we ship is slower, uglier, or more confusing than the consumer products our colleagues build for customers.

What you’ll do

• Own a specific developer workflow, tool, or user problem through discovery, definition, design, build, rollout, and adoption, including the decision to keep it, change it, or retire it. When that decision reaches workflows you do not own, bring the team in.
• Run your own product discovery. Interview engineers, product managers, and designers, watch them work, and read the support tickets, usage data, and CI logs to find the problem most worth solving.
• Turn what you learn into a plan: frame the problem, define who it is for and what changes for them, decide what you are not building, and sequence the smallest useful releases. Larger bets, and work that would expand what you own, go through team planning.
• Design the experience before writing production code, including flows, states, empty states, and error cases. Prototype in Figma or in code, whichever gets to a real answer faster.
• Build what the solution needs. Our products include TypeScript and React interfaces, backend services and APIs, CLIs and terminal UIs, GitHub Apps and Actions, Harness pipeline templates, and Atlassian and Figma integrations. Go deep where you are strongest and pull in teammates where the work calls for other expertise.
• Use AI where it earns its place in the workflows you own: agent workflows, context and tool design, and MCP servers, along with the evaluations, human review points, cost and latency budgets, and guardrails that make them dependable.
• Hold a consumer-grade quality bar on internal software: perceived latency, responsiveness, accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA, honest error messages, and documentation that matches what the tool actually does.
• Decide up front what outcome would prove the work mattered. Instrument adoption, publish what you find, and let the result drive what you do next.
• Earn adoption without authority. Work with design partners, pilot with a few teams, write the launch post, hold office hours, and make the migration path obvious.
• Turn one-off wins into reusable building blocks. You make the technical calls for what you own, and the patterns that come out of them should be easy for teammates to pick up.
  

Who you are

• You have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, excluding internships, and a track record of shipping software people chose to use.
• You have led a complex project from an initially unclear requirement through launch, coordinating with other teams and making sound scope and implementation tradeoffs.
• You are strong in at least one relevant engineering area, such as TypeScript and React or a backend language such as Go, Python, Java, or Rust, and you can work effectively across adjacent layers.
• You have built developer-facing software such as CLIs, internal platforms, SDKs, CI/CD tooling, or IDE integrations, and you can explain what made it useful.
• You seek input from users, reason carefully about interaction and failure states, and communicate clearly in specs, documentation, changelogs, and launch notes.
• You can reason about where an LLM-based capability will help, including failure modes and appropriate human review. Production AI experience is welcome but not required.
• You talk to users on your own initiative, and you can tell the difference between what people ask for and what they need.
• You write clearly. Specs, docs, changelogs, and launch notes count as deliverables here.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and treat it as an opening to add structure.

Bonus

• Experience with Harness, GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar CI/CD systems, including release orchestration at scale.
• Experience automating against Jira, Confluence, GitHub, or Figma APIs, or building apps inside those products.
• Experience with agent frameworks, MCP servers, retrieval, or evaluation systems in production.
• Experience measuring developer productivity with DORA, SPACE, or DevEx-style methods, plus good judgment about how those measurements can be misused.
• Experience with terminal UI frameworks such as Bubble Tea or Textual, design systems, or internal developer portals such as Backstage.

Why Ancestry?

Join a dedicated team working to connect millions of people with their past and enrich their futures. In this role you will shape the tools that every engineer, product manager, and designer at Ancestry uses to build a product trusted by millions of people around the world. We offer a collaborative workplace, competitive compensation, and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

Compensation

Ancestry values pay transparency and equity. As a signatory of the ParityPledge in Support of Women and the ParityPledge in Support of People of Color, we are pleased to share the base salary range for this position: $135,000 - $160,000 with eligibility for bonus, equity, and comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision. Actual salary will depend on location and experience, and ranges are higher in higher cost of labor markets such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle. We will provide detailed compensation data for a specific location during the recruiting process.

Note: Disclosure as required by sb19-085(8-5-20) and sb1162(1-1-23).

Additional Information:

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law. For candidates who live in San Francisco, CA, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.