Our everyday digital experiences are in the middle of a realtime revolution: chatting alongside a livestream, getting realtime financial updates, or working with colleagues in a shared online space. Consumers now expect realtime as standard, and Ably powers a large part of it.

We put developers first. Our products help teams build, extend, and deliver realtime digital experiences, delivering over 700 billion messages to more than 2 billion devices every month. Teams at HubSpot, Fin, Dialpad, NASCAR, Sportsbet, and General Motors all build on Ably.

Working at Ably means helping build the infrastructure that will shape the next generation of the internet. More of what people do online is becoming live, shared and interactive, which only makes what we build more relevant and more necessary. AI is the latest place that shows up. There's still so much to build, and we'd like your help with it.

About this role

As the Staff Tech Lead for the Developer Experience team at Ably, you’ll report directly to our CTO and co-own the DevEx vision and strategy. You’ll lead the engineering team that owns our customer-facing web platform - our dashboard, documentation platform, and control plane - transforming it into a world-class experience for our users.

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 engineers working on initiatives where the feedback loop is immediate, because you and your team are the target users of the very ecosystem you are building.

Ably is an AI-forward organisation and this is a leadership role for an AI-first engineer. You must have confident, hands-on experience of AI-assisted development and be able to define how a team actually works with these tools day to day, and tell the difference between genuine leverage and noise.

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.
Define and lead on AI-first working practices. You’ll be the catalyst and standard-setter for AI-enabled development across the team. You’ll leverage LLMs and AI tools to accelerate velocity, design workflows, set the guardrails and coach engineers to use them well - without compromising on engineering integrity.
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.
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

Real, demonstrable experience leading AI-first engineering. You champion the use of AI as a productivity multiplier for the team, and have led a team that ships with LLMs and AI tooling embedded in its daily workflow. You see AI as an enabler for higher velocity and output, not a replacement for engineering judgment, and hold strong, evidence-based views on what works and what doesn’t.
Extensive experience leading technical teams in technical B2B SaaS or API-first products, with a track record of product-minded engineering teams that take initiative and ownership of product outcomes.
A strong software engineering background with genuine full-stack fluency. You must have enough depth across the web stack to credibly lead and challenge senior web engineers. Hands-on experience with React and TypeScript is valuable, but sound engineering judgement and technical gravitas matter more than specific frameworks.
You have a natural empathy and strong instincts for what developer customers want because you are the target user. You are genuinely excited about building developer tools and can tap into immediate feedback loops. You understand API design, documentation, and the nuances that differentiate a great developer journey.
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

Deep production experience building and shipping customer-facing web applications at scale with React and TypeScript.
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.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

You'll join a team of around 60 people, working directly alongside senior engineering and leadership. No layers, no bureaucracy, and real ownership from day one.

Remote-first

We hire the best people wherever they are across the UK and Europe, trust them to own their work, and share decisions and feedback openly. Twice a year, in February and August, we all meet in person, and we expect everyone to be there.

Remote-first comes with trade-offs. On one side: flexibility, no commute, long stretches of focus time, and a wider pool of people to hire from. On the other: it can feel isolating, relationships take effort to build, and you miss the chance conversations an office creates. As our only recruiter, you'll need to manage your own time and stay close to the hiring managers and candidates you work with.

If you do your best work with trust and autonomy, this will suit you. If you'd rather have an office around you every day, it probably isn't the right fit.

Our six values shape how we work day to day:

Open for all. We default to sharing openly: source, decisions, and feedback, with open minds to match.
Tech needs humanity. We build with empathy, for colleagues and developers alike.
Even the best do better. We keep raising our own bar, driven by curiosity, not complacency.
Bias for action. Once we know enough to act, we act, rather than waiting for certainty.
Dependable by default. We take real ownership of what we ship and what we promise.
Bold creativity wins. We treat big constraints as a reason to think differently, not less.

You can read more about how we defined these values on our blog, and see the team behind them on our careers page.

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals are what make us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to our long-term success. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background, or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to it.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems, we'd love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email;; we're happy to give you advice on your application.

What you'll get

A remote-first and flexible work environment. Our London office (next to Old Street) is there whenever you want it. Aside from our company get-togethers, you're welcome to work wherever suits you best.
Equity. We're a growing start-up, and we want everyone to share in the company's success through our EMI share options programme.
Enhanced holiday allowance: 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday).
Enhanced parental leave, so you can spend time with your new family member: up to 16 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary, depending on length of service.
A home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 per year after that), so your home office serves you well.
A personal learning and development budget of £1000 a year, plus 5% L&D time during working hours to build your skills.
Private healthcare with BUPA.
A medical cash plan covering a range of medical and dental costs.
Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
A monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
Life assurance and income protection.
Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes.
A weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week "Need to Know" meeting.
A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.