Technical Lead, Developer Experience

Skills

About the Role

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.

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

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

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