Technical Lead - Developer Experience (DevEx)

Location: Remote

Salary: £90,000 - £100,000

About us

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. 
We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. 
Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. 
At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn. 

About the role

We are looking for an experienced and proactive Technical Lead - Developer Experience to join our DevEx team and help us drive our new AI-first engineering shift by taking ownership of the internal developer journey, tooling, and documentation to ensure maximum engineering productivity and satisfaction. The remit and focus of the role is to blend deep technical expertise with leadership, requiring you to champion the integration of AI and Generative AI tools into our workflows, mentor and coach engineers, embed a culture of developer-centric quality, and guide the team in making sound technical decisions related to the development lifecycle. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge - if you’re a collaborative and innovative candidate, this is the role for you.

Core responsibilities

• Developer Tooling Architecture & Agentic AI Integration: Define and guide the architecture of internal developer tools and services, specifically assessing, integrating, and maintaining AI-powered tools (e.g., agents, agentic environments, coding assistants, diagnostic tools), balancing trade-offs between speed of development, reliability, and maintainability to meet engineering efficiency goals.
• Agentic-First Engineering Standards: Own and evolve the organisation's agentic AI working practices across R&D — defining standard skills, instructions, agent configurations, and interaction patterns that enable every engineer to work effectively with AI tooling. Establish and maintain an agentic-first SDLC framework, setting clear expectations for how AI agents are incorporated into code authoring, review, testing, documentation, and deployment workflows. Act as the organisation's thought leader on the future of agentic AI in software engineering, continuously scanning the landscape, running experiments, and translating emerging capabilities into practical, adopted standards.
• Developer Productivity and Flow: Champion developer productivity by identifying and addressing pain points in the development lifecycle. Measure key internal metrics (e.g., build times, deployment cycle time) and drive continuous improvement in developer workflows and tooling.
• Automation and Onboarding: Drive automation initiatives, leveraging agentic AI and machine learning techniques, across the team to streamline developer onboarding, reduce cognitive load, and eliminate development environment toil.
• Technical Standards & Documentation: Define and uphold developer experience standards, promote clear documentation, and work with teams to ensure seamless adoption of new technologies and best practices. Ensure production readiness standards for all services.
• Planning and Delivery: Lead technical estimation and feasibility assessments for DX initiatives, ensuring plans are realistic and aligned with team capacity. Contribute to structured release planning and support post-release reviews.
• Mentorship and Coaching: Mentor and coach engineers through constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and motivation. Foster alignment and help the team galvanise around technical solutions and goals.
• Collaboration and Feedback: Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other engineers to gather feedback, understand developer pain points, and align technical direction with product strategy. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Requirements

About you

• Experience: Considerable experience in Developer Relations, Developer Productivity, or building internal tooling on complex systems.
• AI/Machine Learning in DX: Proven experience integrating and leveraging AI, machine learning, or generative AI tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Coder) to significantly improve developer workflows, accelerate feature delivery, and increase overall engineering efficiency.
• Cloud Systems: Extensive expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures for building developer-facing services.
• Developer Workflow Optimisation: Proven experience with measuring and optimizing engineering efficiency metrics and reducing deployment friction.
• Infrastructure as Code: Advanced proficiency with Terraform and configuration management tools for managing developer environments.
• Scripting: Strong skills in Python, Go, or a similar language for automation and tooling.
• Programming: Experience in PHP, or another language; preferably in a significantly sized Object Orientated codebase.
• Observability: Deep experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., DataDog or equivalent), focusing on gathering insights into developer friction points and incident/problem management.
• System Design: Expert understanding of distributed systems and microservices and how to apply resilience patterns to internal tools.
• Tooling: Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS) for creating standardized development environments.
• CI/CD: Practical experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines to ensure a smooth deployment experience for other engineers.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability in mentoring and supporting the growth of fellow engineers, experience organising and driving team workstreams.

Benefits

What we offer

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks 
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa 
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) 
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

Interview process

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at careers@arbor-education.com.

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice. 

Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively  encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

Refer a friend 

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: careers@arbor-education.com 

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.