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.