Staff Tech Lead, Web & Developer Products

Ably; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Ably is hiring a Staff Tech Lead for the Developer Experience team in London. You’ll co‑own the DevEx vision, lead the engineering team building our dashboard, documentation platform, and control plane, and elevate the developer experience across the Ably platform.

As an AI‑first engineer, you’ll apply AI-assisted development, set guardrails, and mentor five engineers to ship with velocity while maintaining quality and engineering judgment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading AI-first engineering teams.
• Proven ability to ship with AI tooling embedded in daily workflow.
• Strong advocacy for AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement for engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of five engineers building customer-facing web apps and own the technical architecture for dashboard, docs, marketing site, and billing UI.
• Define AI-first working practices and set guardrails for AI-enabled development.
• Drive a product-focused engineering culture with ownership of features and customer outcomes.
• Mentor engineers, manage performance, and guide hiring to grow leadership within the team.

Skills

AI-first leadership

Full-stack engineering

Technical vision

Mentoring

Hiring & performance management

Tools

LLMs

Job description

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