Lead - Software Engineer (DevEx)
London
Lead Software Engineer - Developer Experience (DevEx)
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I****n Short**
At On, we believe technology should move as fast as a runner. We are building the foundation that allows our engineering organization to scale, innovate, and deliver value without friction. We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join the Developer Experience (DevEx) team.
In this hands-on role, you will build the platform that empowers dozens of technology teams to build, ship, and operate services effortlessly. You will be involved in architecting and building our "Golden Path," ensuring that speed, safety, and reliability are baked into every developer's workflow.
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Your Mission**
- Help Engineer the Golden Path: Design and implement highly automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) and common templating (Typescript/Node) systems that allow a developer to go from "idea" to "production-ready service" in minutes.
- GraphQL Infrastructure: Act as a core contributor to our central Apollo GraphQL API Gateway. You will help manage the supergraph composition, runtime stability, and schema governance standards to ensure a consistent contract for all consumers.
- Help to Build the Internal Developer Platform (IDP): Help develop our Cloud Abstraction Layer and Developer Portal. This includes building self-service tools, CLIs, and service catalogs that reduce cognitive load for engineers.
- SRE & Observability: Integrate "secure-by-default" practices and robust observability into the platform. You’ll build dashboards (NewRelic) and monitoring patterns that provide teams with deep insights into their service health.
- Technical Excellence & Advocacy: Write high-quality documentation, help with code reviews and advocate for DevEx best practices across the organization.
- Friction Reduction: Actively hunt for bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle. Whether it's a slow build or a complex deployment process, you'll be involved in fixing it.
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Your Technical Story**
- Product Thinking: You treat internal developers as your customers. You listen to their pain points and iterate on the platform based on real-world feedback.
- Infrastructure as Code: You are comfortable with Terraform and Kubernetes (GCP experience is a plus), treating infrastructure with the same rigor as application code.
- Automation Mindset: You are passionate about CI/CD (GitHub Actions) and building developer tooling (CLIs, SDKs, or Portals).
- AI-Augmented Engineering Workflows: You leverage (or at least have an active interest in) the latest agentic coding tools to 10x your productivity, blending deep technical principles with AI-assisted workflows. As a power user of AI, you orchestrate complex builds and bypass boilerplate to deliver robust, scalable code at pace, ensuring our TypeScript/Node.js environment remains lean and efficient (experience in other tech stacks will be considered).
- Architectural API Design: Experience in crafting robust API contracts with a focus on GraphQL Federation; familiarity with the Apollo tech stack is highly regarded.
- Data-Driven: You understand DORA metrics and DevEx signals, using them to measure the success of the tools you build.
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What Success Looks Like**
- Velocity: A measurable reduction in lead time for new services reaching production.
- Autonomy: Product teams can provision infrastructure and deploy APIs independently using your self-service tools.
- Stability: High adoption of standardised "Golden Path" templates, leading to fewer production incidents and faster MTTR.
- Satisfaction: High internal Developer Satisfaction (DevEx) scores and positive feedback on the tooling you maintain.
- Team Spirit: You thrive in a high-performing "sports team" culture, contributing to the power of the whole through consistent teamwork and earned leadership.
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Meet the Team**
The Developer Experience team serves as the bridge between infrastructure and product. We don't just measure "uptime"; we measure "time to value." As a Staff Engineer on this team, you will be at the heart of our engineering culture, defining the standard for how software is built and delivered at On.
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