Developer Experience Engineer

Black Forest Labs · San Francisco · €140,000–€190,000 (stated in the posting)

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About Black Forest Labs

We’re the team building the foundational layer for visual intelligence: multimodal models trained jointly on images, video, audio, and action to see, generate, and understand the world.

Our founding team pioneered latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion, the breakthroughs that made generative AI accessible to millions. With FLUX, we're pushing into generative media at scale, machines that act in the physical world, and emerging applications in computer use.

Our FLUX models top public benchmarks and run in production in some of the world's biggest platforms. We're a small, fast growing research lab competing with the largest companies in the world. From our labs in Freiburg to San Francisco, we're building what comes next.

Why This Role

FLUX is the model developers want. BFL still has to become the platform they choose. In 2026 that platform is judged by a single question, asked by both humans and the agents acting on their behalf: how fast can I go from idea to a production-shaped call, and how good does it feel along the way?

We're hiring one person to own that answer end-to-end. Not the SDK alone, not the dashboard alone, not the API alone — the whole developer experience, for both the humans building on BFL and the agents building on their behalf. You're the person on the team who breathes DevExp: spotting where the platform is friction for a developer or for an agent, deciding whether the fix lives in the API contract, the SDK, the console, the docs surface, the MCP server, or the onboarding flow — and then shipping it.

You sit inside product engineering. You work shoulder-to-shoulder with the API/platform eng team (think: designing the next API revision), with research as new capabilities land, and with DevRel. Your job is to make BFL the platform that wins on developer experience, the way Stripe won payments and Vercel won frontends.

What You’ll Work On

• Own DevExp as a product surface — wherever the bottleneck is, that's where you ship next. One sprint that might be the API contract, the next it's the dashboard onboarding, the next it's an MCP server, the next it's a Python SDK abstraction

• Partner with platform engineering on API design before it ships, not after — bring the developer-and-agent perspective into the room when the contract is being decided

• Work with product engineering on the developer-facing surfaces of the dashboard — playground, API keys, usage, request inspectors, webhook debugging — bringing the DevExp lens to features the rest of the team is already shipping

• Make BFL the best visual AI platform for agents to use. Own the MCP server, skills, agent onboarding paths, and the machine-readable surfaces of the platform. Design the reference patterns and SDK primitives developers reach for when building agentic workflows on FLUX. Stress-test every API and SDK change against "would Claude / GPT / an autonomous agent get this right on the first try?" — and treat agents as a first-class user across the whole product (errors an LLM can recover from, capabilities discoverable without a human reading docs, audit trails that make sense when most of the traffic on an account isn't a person).

• Own the portfolio of entry points developers and agents reach for — SDKs (Python, TypeScript, more on demand), MCP server, skills, OpenAPI / typed surfaces — and treat them as a portfolio, not a hierarchy. SDKs add composable workflows and sane defaults for async / polling / retries; MCP and skills make BFL trivially usable from any agent loop. DevRel and the Creative Technologist team partner on examples, content, and showcase work on top of these surfaces — you own the surfaces themselves.

• Partner with the Growth engineer and Product on the developer funnel — signup → first key → first call → first production call → repeat — and own the DevExp fixes for the cliffs they surface

• Be opinionated. Versioning, error formats, breaking change policy, idempotency, naming — you have takes and you can defend them. The bar is Stripe: an API and SDK so well-designed the docs almost feel unnecessary.

What We’re Looking For

• 4+ years building software, with meaningful time on developer-facing products — SDKs, APIs, dashboards, consoles, platforms developers actually use

• Full-stack comfortable. TypeScript / React / Next on the front, Python (and ideally Go or Rust) on the back. You don't need a separate person to wire the two halves of a feature together.

• Deep instincts on API design — you have opinions about error formats, pagination, async job shapes, breaking changes, and you've lived with the consequences of bad ones

• Fluent in the 2026 agent stack — MCP, tool use, the major agent runtimes — and you know what breaks when an LLM is the one reading your error message or browsing your API

• You've shipped developer-facing product that real external developers depend on. Not internal tooling.

• You ship. This is product engineering, not product management with an IDE open.

Nice to Have

• Background at a developer platform where DevExp was a top-level metric (Stripe, Vercel, Cloudflare, Modal, Replicate, Resend, Linear, Anthropic platform, etc.)

• You've built or meaningfully contributed to an MCP server real users / agents rely on

• Experience with media-generation or other high-latency, async, job-shaped APIs — and the UX puzzles that come with them (polling, webhooks, partial results, cost surprises)

• A public surface — OSS, a writeup, a dashboard you're proud of — that lets us see your taste before the interview

How We Work Together

We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in San Francisco at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in-person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in-person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.

Everything we do is grounded in four values:

• Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.

• Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.

• Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.

• Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.

If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.

Base Annual Salary:

EU €140,000 - €190,000 + Equity

Note: We may use AI-assisted tools to help organize applications. All hiring decisions are always made by our team.

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