Technical Lead, Developer Experience

About this role

As the Technical Lead for Developer Experience at Ably you will report directly to our CTO and co-own the DevEx vision and strategy, transforming our dashboard, documentation platform, and control plane into a world-class experience. You are a senior, hands-on engineer who’s passionate about building for developers like yourself; someone who’ll obsess over the developer journey and elevate the user experience of the Ably platform.

You’ll blend deep full-stack expertise with a strong product mindset and lead a team of five engineers where the feedback loop is immediate, because you and your team are the target users of the very ecosystem you are building.

Day to day you will

• Obsess over developer experience. You’ll have broad responsibility for elevating how developers interact with Ably’s platform and services, partnering with the DevEx PM as a unified leadership team to deliver a developer experience that becomes a reference point for the industry.
• Lead technical execution and vision. You’ll lead a team of five engineers building customer-facing web applications and own the technical architecture and design decisions for our dashboard, docs platform, marketing website, and billing UI.
• Drive a product-first engineering culture. You’ll foster an environment where engineers are themselves principal stakeholders of product features, and obsess over customer outcomes. You’ll challenge the "feature factory" mentality and build a team that takes true ownership of the product.
• Thrive in a rapid iteration environment. You’ll operate in a high-velocity workspace where PMs, customers, and engineers co-create features. You’ll lead the team in working full-stack to iterate, improve, and ship improvements quickly.
• Champion AI-assisted development. You’ll be a catalyst for AI adoption across the team. You’ll leverage LLMs and AI tools to accelerate velocity without compromising on engineering integrity.
• Guide engineering outcomes and quality. You’ll set and enforce high standards for code review, testing, and production readiness. You will participate in incident response and coordinate with the Infrastructure team on platform dependencies and deployments.
• Mentor and grow the team. You’ll manage performance, career development, and hiring. You will hold the team accountable for delivery commitments while providing the mentorship needed to turn engineers into product-minded leaders.

We'd love to talk if you have

• A natural empathy for developer customers because you are the target audience. You are genuinely excited about building developer tools and instinctively understand what good looks like. You're fluent in API design, documentation, and the nuances that differentiate a great developer journey.
• Extensive experience leading teams at B2B SaaS or API-first companies. You have a track record of building product-minded engineering cultures where teams take initiative and ownership of product outcomes.
• A strong software engineering background with expertise in React, TypeScript, and modern JavaScript, alongside backend experience in Ruby on Rails or Node.js. You're comfortable writing code and building prototypes using our APIs, and have built and shipped customer-facing web applications at scale.
• An AI-first mindset. You champion the use of LLMs and AI tools as productivity multipliers for the team. You see AI as an enabler for higher velocity and output, not a replacement for engineering judgment.
• Experience at a startup or growth-stage company or adaptability to thrive in a fast-paced, agile environment with a focus on rapid iteration. To be effective in this role you’ll need excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Bonus points if you have

• Experience delivering solutions used by software developers (developer tooling or APIs) or similar technical personas.
• An understanding of pub/sub and familiarity with distributed systems and event based architectures.