Developer Experience Engineer
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
We are looking for an experienced Developer Experience Engineer (DevEx / DX) to join our Platform team with a remit of accelerating developers and removing engineering friction across the organisation.
This role can be based in any of our UK offices: London, Manchester or Bath.
As the first DevEx engineer, you will shape how developer experience is measured and improved across the organisation.This is a founding individual contributor role, suited to someone excited by building a DevEx function from the ground up and delivering meaningful change in a hands-on way. Success will be measured by improvements in developer productivity metrics, reduced onboarding time (as engineers join or move between teams), faster feedback loops in CI/CD, and high satisfaction from engineering teams.
Reporting to the Director of Engineering for Platform, and partnering with engineering leadership, you will assume a range of key responsibilities to define and deliver Netcraft's DevEx roadmaps, identifying areas of friction, prioritising the right initiatives, implementing improvements directly where needed, and enabling teams to own and execute improvements with appropriate guidance and support.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Lead the evaluation and integration of developer tools, especially AI-assisted development tooling. Support team adoption by sharing knowledge, running demos, tracking utilisation and demonstrating value. Experiment with emerging developer tooling and evaluate their real-world impact on engineering productivity.
- Develop and maintain "golden path" templates and scaffolding to accelerate project bootstrapping and promote consistent engineering practices.
- Improve and standardise the local development experience across all engineering teams (environment setup, local services, test data, etc.) to reduce onboarding and iteration time.
- Work with the rest of the Platform Engineering department to securely abstract Infrastructure and Cloud tasks away from software engineers.
- Support teams by assessing and recommending improvements to CI/CD pipelines and SDLC processes. Reduce build and test feedback loops by improving CI pipeline performance and reliability.
- Define and track developer productivity metrics (e.g. build times, CI performance, deployment frequency) to identify systemic friction and measure improvement.
- Help software teams to curate high-quality pipelines and tests, ensuring high release confidence.
- Build and maintain internal developer tools (CLIs, automations, shared libraries, etc.) that simplify common engineering workflows.
- Conduct regular user research and feedback sessions with engineering teams to identify friction points and propose improvements.
- Improve the structure and discoverability of engineering documentation, reducing time-to-first-MR and improving engineering onboarding.
Our tech stack includes:
- Dev tools: Cursor, Claude, Codex, JetBrains (IntelliJ/GoLand)
- CI/CD: GitLab Premium (self-hosted)
- Backend: Typescript, tRPC, Go, OpenAPI, RabbitMQ, MariaDB
- Infrastructure: Terraform/OpenTofu, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Puppet, Rocky Linux
- DORA metrics: Sleuth
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in Software Engineering, DevEx, and/or Platform Engineering roles.
- Strong proficiency in at least one modern systems or scripting language (Ideally Go).
- Demonstrated experience integrating generative AI-powered tooling into software workflows.
- Understanding of the limitations, failure modes, and security risks associated with LLMs (hallucinations, prompt injection, context window limits, etc.)
- Deep understanding of the modern SDLC, including Git flow, CI/CD (especially GitLab CI), and containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Exceptional empathy for the developer experience; a product mindset where the "customer" is the internal software engineer.An understanding of the developer mindset, to ensure keen adoption of new tools and practices.
- Strong written communication skills, with the ability to write documentation that is easily parsable by both humans and LLMs.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and define standards in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.
- An awareness of cost implications in a cloud environment, and methods of optimising services for maximum ROI.
Bonus points if you have:
- Agentic workflows: Experience building or coordinating autonomous agents that can perform multi-step engineering tasks.
- Dev portal expertise: Experience with Backstage.io or other developer portals.