Technical Lead, Developer Experience
You will report directly to the CTO and co-own the DevEx vision and strategy, transforming the dashboard, documentation platform, and control plane into a world-class developer experience. You will lead a team of five engineers building customer-facing web applications and own the technical architecture for the dashboard, docs platform, marketing website, and billing UI. You will foster a product-first engineering culture, champion AI-assisted development, set high standards for code review and testing, participate in incident response, and mentor engineers through performance management, career development, and hiring.
Responsibilities
- Elevate how developers interact with Ably's platform and services
- Lead a team of five engineers building customer-facing web applications
- Own the technical architecture and design decisions for the dashboard, docs platform, marketing website, and billing UI
- Drive a product-first engineering culture focused on customer outcomes
- Lead full-stack iteration to ship improvements quickly
- Champion AI-assisted development using LLMs and AI tools
- Set and enforce standards for code review, testing, and production readiness
- Participate in incident response and coordinate with the Infrastructure team
- Manage performance, career development, and hiring for the team
- Mentor engineers into product-minded leaders
Requirements
- Natural empathy for developer customers and passion for building developer tools
- Fluency in API design and documentation
- Extensive experience leading teams at B2B SaaS or API-first companies
- Strong software engineering background with React, TypeScript, and modern JavaScript
- Backend experience in Ruby on Rails or Node.js
- Experience building and shipping customer-facing web applications at scale
- AI-first mindset using LLMs and AI tools as productivity multipliers
- Experience at a startup or growth-stage company or adaptability to a fast-paced agile environment
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Bonus: experience delivering developer tooling or APIs
- Bonus: understanding of pub/sub, distributed systems, and event-based architectures
Benefits
- Remote-first and flexible work environment
- Equity through EMI share options programme
- 28 days of paid annual leave plus a birthday day off
- Enhanced parental leave package
- Home workstation budget of £500 on joining and £150 annually thereafter
- Personal learning and development budget of £1000 annually with 5% L&D time
- Private healthcare with BUPA
- Medical cash plan covering medical and dental costs
- Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space
- Monthly wellbeing budget via Juno
- Life assurance and income protection
- Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes
- Weekly snack allowance
- Fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years