Backstage Engineer

Your mission is to deeply integrate Earthly Lunar into Backstage, enabling organizations to surface real-time engineering standards compliance directly in the developer portal. You’ll design and own a plugin that not only visualizes SDLC metadata, but also makes policies actionable, giving developers clear, contextual feedback where they already work.

You’ll work directly on the problems that make Backstage challenging: fix the low internal adoption problem, poor integration with developer workflows, lack of automation, and limited signal quality in scorecards. Your goal is to change that, making Backstage not just a catalog, but a trusted interface for SDLC health.

About Earthly

Earthly helps engineering organizations monitor and govern the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Our product, Earthly Lunar, gives platform teams real-time visibility into whether services are adhering to engineering standards across CI/CD pipelines, codebases, and developer workflows. Lunar continuously enforces policies like security checks, infrastructure conventions, and compliance requirements, helping large organizations ship software that is safer and more reliable.

We’re a small, remote-first team of senior engineers and product builders. We’ve previously worked at places like DigitalOcean, VMware, Google, RabbitMQ, and IBM, and we’re backed by a group of top-tier investors including Work-Bench, Innovation Endeavors and 468 Capital, as well as the founders or creators of Datadog, Sentry, Cockroach Labs, Mesosphere, Kubernetes, Envoy, GitHub Copilot, and many more. We are known for having previously built Earthfiles - 11.8k stars on GitHub, in use today at NVidia, Intel, VMware, Roche, Roblox, Bluecore, Zapier, Adobe.

Responsibilities

1. Lead the design and development of the official Earthly Lunar Backstage plugin, from MVP to production-ready release

2. Surface rich SDLC metadata and policy results within Backstage in ways that are actionable and useful for developers

3. Build with empathy for both platform teams and app developers — creating experiences that reduce friction and drive adoption

4. Partner with customers and design to shape UX patterns, component models, and data flows for the plugin

5. Collaborate with Earthly’s product and GTM teams to ensure the plugin drives value in customer environments

6. Work with our early customers to support real-world deployments and ensure successful plugin rollout in their Backstage instances

7. Contribute to Earthly Lunar’s broader platform engineering strategy and provide insight into common challenges faced by teams adopting IDPs

8. Represent Earthly in the Backstage open-source community where appropriate (e.g. RFCs, contributions, collaboration)

Competence

• Deep experience with Backstage: You’ve deployed Backstage at scale in a real engineering org and contributed custom plugins, entities, or processors.

• Strong TypeScript + React skills: You’re comfortable building polished, interactive UIs inside Backstage and integrating with backend APIs.

• Platform engineering experience: You’ve built tools or platforms for other engineers. You know how to reduce friction and how to balance flexibility with convention.

• Empathy for adoption pain: You’ve worked directly with app teams, listened to their feedback, and helped them succeed with internal tools.

• Understanding of CI/CD, SDLC practices, and developer workflows: You don’t need to be an expert in compliance or security, but you understand how policies and engineering standards show up in practice.

• Strong ownership mentality: You take a feature from concept to production, care about UX, and work well in small, high-trust teams.

• (Bonus points) Open-source contributions to Backstage.

• (Bonus points) Any Go experience.

• (Bonus points) Strong SQL experience, especially Postgres.

Benefits

• Healthcare, dental, and vision plans including dependents (US and Canada only)

• Fully remote company, with +/- 3 hours time-zone difference of each other: no late night meetings.

• Incentive stock plan

• 401k/RRSP with employer matching (US and Canada only)

• Life insurance (US and Canada only)

• Credits for gym or activity equipment (US and Canada only)

• Work at an early-stage company, where your actions have a high impact. An environment with boundless freedom and high responsibility. Excellent if you want to pursue the founder path in your career.

Compensation

The yearly salary range listed is the US base salary for this full-time position. It does not include bonuses, equity, or other benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within this range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education and training. Earthly expects to hire for this position near the middle of the range. Only in truly rare and exceptional circumstances, where an external candidate has experience, credentials, or expertise that far exceed those required or expected for the position would Earthly consider paying a salary or rate near the higher end of the range. Your recruiter or hiring manager can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Remote restrictions

• Workday must overlap by at least 5 hours with San Francisco, CA, USA