Developer Experience Lead

Jobtailor; Dublin; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

EXL is seeking a senior Developer Experience and Engineering Operations leader in Ireland to guide the roadmap across CI/CD, tooling, and AI-enabled development. You will partner with Architecture, Platform Engineering, Cloud, DevOps, Security and Product teams to raise delivery velocity and platform maturity.

You will drive standards, playbooks and reusable templates, run enablement programs, and measure impact through adoption and metrics to ensure security and governance across distributed

Qualifications

• Significant experience in Developer Experience, engineering operations or related roles.
• Proven track record improving developer productivity and delivery effectiveness across multiple teams.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native delivery, microservices, and secure SDLC.
• Experience defining standards, playbooks or golden paths for consistency and speed.
• Familiarity with GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket and CI/CD toolchains; IaC; containers; AI tools.
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the Developer Experience and Engineering Operations roadmap.
• Identify highest-friction points in the engineering lifecycle via interviews and metrics.
• Establish standards, templates, and reference workflows for consistency.
• Partner with Architecture, Platform Engineering, Cloud, DevOps and Product teams to improve CI/CD and automation.
• Drive responsible AI adoption across the SDLC, including AI tooling and governance.
• Create guidance for AI-assisted engineering practices, security and data handling.
• Evangelise platform capabilities and reusable assets across engineering teams.
• Develop enablement programmes: playbooks, demos, workshops and onboarding journeys.
• Own the developer tooling adoption across IDEs, portals and AI platforms.
• Define measurement framework for Developer Experience: adoption, friction, cycle time, quality.
• Create feedback loops for standards, workflows and roadmaps.
• Support leadership in improving delivery transparency and collaboration.
• Ensure improvements align with security, compliance and governance.

Skills

DevEx leadership

Software engineering

Platform engineering

CI/CD

AI in software engineering

Stakeholder influence

Communication

Data-driven decision making

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Equivalent practical experience

Tools

GitHub

GitLab

Bitbucket

CI/CD platforms

Infrastructure as Code

Containers

Developer portals

IDEs

AI-assisted development tools

Job description

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the Developer Experience and Engineering Operations roadmap, aligned to EXL's Products, Platforms and AI engineering priorities.
• Identify the highest-friction points in the engineering lifecycle through developer interviews, workflow analysis, metrics, delivery retrospectives and leadership input.
• Establish practical engineering standards, golden paths, reusable templates, delivery playbooks and reference workflows that help teams build and operate solutions consistently.
• Partner with Architecture, Platform Engineering, Cloud, DevOps, Security and Product Engineering teams to improve CI/CD, local development, build and test automation, environment management, release readiness, observability and operational feedback loops.
• Drive responsible AI adoption across the SDLC, including AI coding assistants, code review support, test generation, documentation automation, knowledge retrieval and agentic workflow opportunities.
• Create clear guidance for AI-assisted engineering practices, including appropriate use, security boundaries, data handling, prompt and context patterns, review expectations and quality controls.
• Evangelise EXLerate.ai and related platform capabilities across engineering teams, helping teams understand where the platform should be used, how reusable assets should be created, and how AI-enabled solutions should be governed and operated.
• Develop enablement programmes such as communities of practice, office hours, playbooks, internal demos, workshops, onboarding journeys and hands‑on adoption campaigns.
• Own the developer tooling adoption approach across IDEs, source control, CI/CD, documentation, internal portals, AI tools and engineering intelligence platforms, ensuring tools are useful, governed and adopted for measurable value.
• Define a measurement framework for Developer Experience, including adoption, satisfaction, friction reduction, cycle time, build and test reliability, onboarding time, tool effectiveness, quality signals and AI-assisted engineering outcomes.
• Create structured feedback loops so engineering teams can contribute to standards, improve shared workflows and influence the roadmap for internal platforms and tools.
• Support engineering leaders in improving delivery transparency, operating cadences, decision management, documentation discipline and cross‑team dependency management.
• Ensure Developer Experience improvements are aligned with security, compliance, responsible AI, architecture governance and operational risk expectations.

Requirements

• Significant experience in software engineering, platform engineering, developer experience, architecture, DevOps, SRE or engineering operations roles.
• Demonstrable track record improving developer productivity, engineering standards or delivery effectiveness across a multi‑team engineering organization.
• Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices, including cloud‑native development, APIs, microservices, CI/CD, test automation, secure SDLC, observability, operational readiness and release management.
• Experience defining standards, playbooks or golden paths that improve consistency while preserving team autonomy and delivery speed.
• Practical knowledge of modern engineering toolchains such as GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket; CI/CD platforms; infrastructure as code; containers; developer portals; documentation platforms; IDEs; and AI‑assisted development tools.
• Experience evaluating, rolling out or governing AI tools, automation or productivity platforms within an engineering organisation.
• Ability to influence senior engineering, architecture, product, security and operations stakeholders without relying solely on formal authority.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical practices into clear guidance, adoption plans, executive updates and enablement materials.
• Data‑informed approach to decision‑making, with experience using metrics, qualitative feedback and adoption data to prioritise improvements.
• Experience working with globally distributed teams and creating practices that work across locations, time zones and delivery cultures.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Certifications & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science
• Bachelor's degree in Engineering
• related discipline