Technical Lead, Developer ExperienceUp to £150,000

About the Role

Ably runs the realtime messaging infrastructure behind products from Harness, EA, Panasonic, and HubSpot — billions of messages a day across millions of devices. Their customers are developers, and the surfaces those developers touch first — the analytics dashboard, the documentation, the sign-up journey, the billing UI — are what earn or lose their trust. This is a Staff-level, full-stack role that owns the entire front-end suite end-to-end. You'll co-own the DevEx vision alongside the DevEx PM, report directly to the CTO, and lead a team of five engineers responsible for every customer-facing web application Ably ships. You'll collaborate closely with the SDK teams and the realtime infrastructure teams whose work sits underneath the experience you're building.

You're the target user of what your team builds, and that closes the feedback loop in a way most engineering roles don't get. You'll set the technical architecture across the analytics dashboard, docs platform, marketing site, and sign-up and billing flows. You'll push the team to operate full-stack, ship quickly, and behave like principal stakeholders of the features they own rather than a feature factory. You'll be the catalyst for how AI tools get adopted across the team — Ably wants someone who treats LLMs as productivity multipliers, not a threat to engineering judgment. You'll set the bar on code review, testing, and incident response, and run hiring, performance, and career development for the team.

What They're Looking For

• You're a strong full-stack JavaScript engineer who can own the entire front-end suite — analytics dashboard, documentation, sign-up journey — and has the backend chops in Ruby on Rails or Node.js to go all the way down the stack.
• You're hands-on with React, TypeScript, and modern JavaScript, and you're comfortable writing code, prototyping against APIs, and shipping customer-facing web apps at scale.
• You have a real point of view on developer tooling — you can name your favourite tools, articulate what makes good DevEx, and apply that intellectual rigor to the experience your team builds.
• You have genuine empathy for developer customers because you are one. You instinctively understand what good API design and documentation look like, and you've shipped solutions used by developer or technical personas.
• You champion LLMs and AI tools as part of the everyday engineering loop, and can point to concrete examples of how you've integrated them into a team's workflow to lift velocity.
• You bring management experience — ideally you've led a small engineering team — and you're comfortable balancing hands-on technical leadership with people development.
• You've operated in startup or growth-stage environments and thrive on rapid iteration — high-velocity workspaces where PMs, customers, and engineers co-create features.

About Ably

Ably is the realtime messaging platform that powers live experiences at scale — chat, collaboration, financial data, livestreams — for customers including Harness, EA, Panasonic, and HubSpot. Founded in 2012 and Series B funded, the team operates remote-first from London with a monthly in-person hub at Old Street. The company is built around a developer-first commitment, and this role is squarely about making that commitment real on the surfaces every customer actually touches.