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.