Lead roadmap and delivery of the developer portal and DORA/OKR dashboards, remove friction in developer experience, set production operations standards, design technical upskilling curriculum (including AI-assisted tools), run community-building and hackathons, pilot AI dev tools, and manage day-to-day delivery of an offshore team while reporting status and risks to engineering leadership.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the roadmap and delivery of the developer portal (self-service tooling, documentation, service catalog).
- Deliver DORA metrics and OKR dashboards to measure delivery health across engineering teams.
- Identify and prioritize friction points in the developer experience; ship platform/process fixes.
- Define and evangelize modern architecture patterns and testing practices as organization-wide guidance.
- Set standards for production operations (on-call, runbooks, operational readiness) across teams.
- Design and deliver the technical curriculum for upskilling engineers, including on AI-assisted development (Copilot, Claude Code, and emerging tools like BMAD/Kiro/GSD etc).
- Drive community building initiatives (guilds, brown bags, internal tech talks) and organize hackathons.
- Evaluate and pilot new AI development tools/skills, and decide what gets adopted org-wide.
- Run day-to-day delivery of the offshore development team supporting the portal and dashboards: sprint commitments, code review, real-time unblocking, and hands-on work on critical-path items.
- Report delivery status, risks, and blockers to engineering leadership.
Must-Have Qualifications
- 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years as a tech lead owning end-to-end delivery of developer-experience or platform initiatives (not a pure design/review architect role).
- Proven track record of shipping developer-platform initiatives on committed timelines, including hands-on troubleshooting under delivery pressure.
- Proven experience building and operating a developer portal (e.g., Backstage or equivalent).
- Strong experience designing DORA metrics/OKR dashboards and using them to drive engineering improvement.
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose organizational friction points and translate them into platform or process solutions.
- Deep, broad knowledge of modern architecture patterns and testing practices across multiple tech stacks.
- Experience with production operations standards (incident response, runbooks, SRE practices).
- Proven experience designing technical curricula and running enablement/training programs at scale.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) and evaluating emerging tools.
- Experience running hackathons and community-building programs.
- Financial-services or regulated-industry engineering-culture experience preferred.
- Excellent communication and facilitation skills; able to influence across the engineering org and directly manage day-to-day delivery of an offshore team (standups, unblocking, sprint accountability).
Nice-to-Have Qualifications
- Direct experience with Backstage plugin development.
- Familiarity with emerging AI dev tools (Specprime, BMAD, Kiro, or similar) beyond mainstream Copilot/Claude Code.
- Experience speaking at or organizing external developer conferences/meetups.
- Background in technical training/curriculum design as a primary discipline (e.g., prior DevRel or L&D role).
Compensation, Benefits and Duration
Minimum Compensation: USD 56,000
Maximum Compensation: USD 196,000
Compensation is based on actual experience and qualifications of the candidate. The above is a reasonable and a good faith estimate for the role.
Medical, vision, and dental benefits, 401k retirement plan, variable pay/incentives, paid time off, and paid holidays are available for full-time employees.
This position is not available for independent contractors
No applications will be considered if received more than 120 days after the date of this post
Photon Chicago, Illinois, USA Office
11 East Adams Street Suite 1100, Chicago, IL, United States, 60603
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