Developer Experience Engineer
Netcraft
The company
Netcraft is the global leader in cybercrime detection and disruption. We’re a trusted partner for three of the four largest companies in the world, twelve of the fifty largest banks, and five country governments. We've blocked almost 200 million cyber-attacks to date, and we take down around 33% of the world's phishing attacks.
Our purpose and passion are focused on just one thing: protecting the world from cybercrime.
We carry that passion through into our workplace too. Our people are highly talented, and everyone is valued for their individual contribution, so we make sure Netcraft is a great place to work. From great benefits to health and wellness and social events, we’ve got you covered.
The role
We are looking for an experienced Developer Experience Engineer (DevEx / DX) to join our Platform team with a remit of accelerating developers and removing engineering friction across the organisation.
This role can be based in any of our UK offices: London, Manchester or Bath.
As the first DevEx engineer, you will shape how developer experience is measured and improved across the organisation.This is a founding individual contributor role, suited to someone excited by building a DevEx function from the ground up and delivering meaningful change in a hands-on way.
Success will be measured by improvements in developer productivity metrics, reduced onboarding time (as engineers join or move between teams), faster feedback loops in CI/CD, and high satisfaction from engineering teams.
Reporting to the Director of Engineering for Platform, and partnering with engineering leadership, you will assume a range of key responsibilities to define and deliver Netcraft’s DevEx roadmaps, identifying areas of friction, prioritising the right initiatives, implementing improvements directly where needed, and enabling teams to own and execute improvements with appropriate guidance and support.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Lead the evaluation and integration of developer tools, especially AI-assisted development tooling. Support team adoption by sharing knowledge, running demos, tracking utilisation and demonstrating value. Experiment with emerging developer tooling and evaluate their real-world impact on engineering productivity.
- Develop and maintain "golden path" templates and scaffolding to accelerate project bootstrapping and promote consistent engineering practices.
- Improve and standardise the local development experience across all engineering teams (environment setup, local services, test data, etc.) to reduce onboarding and iteration time.
- Work with the rest of the Platform Engineering department to securely abstract Infrastructure and Cloud tasks away from software engineers.
- Support teams by assessing and recommending improvements to CI/CD pipelines and SDLC processes. Reduce build and test feedback loops by improving CI pipeline performance and reliability.
- Define and track developer productivity metrics (e.g. build times, CI performance, deployment frequency) to identify systemic friction and measure improvement.
- Help software teams to curate high-quality pipelines and tests, ensuring high release confidence.
- Build and maintain internal developer tools (CLIs, automations, shared libraries, etc.) that simplify common engineering workflows.
- Conduct regular user research and feedback sessions with engineering teams to identify friction points and propose improvements.
- Improve the structure and discoverability of engineering documentation, reducing time-to-first-MR and improving engineering onboarding.
Our tech stack includes:
- Dev tools: Cursor, Claude, Codex, JetBrains (IntelliJ/GoLand)
- CI/CD: GitLab Premium (self-hosted)
- Frontend: Next.js, React, Tailwind, TypeScript
- Backend: Typescript, tRPC, Go, OpenAPI, RabbitMQ, MariaDB
- Infrastructure: Terraform/OpenTofu, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Puppet, Rocky Linux
- DORA metrics: Sleuth
To be successful, you’ll need:
- 4+ years of experience in Software Engineering, DevEx, and/or Platform Engineering roles.
- Strong proficiency in at least one modern systems or scripting language (Ideally Go).
- Demonstrated experience integrating generative AI-powered tooling into software workflows.
- Understanding of the limitations, failure modes, and security risks associated with LLMs (hallucinations, prompt injection, context window limits, etc.)
- Deep understanding of the modern SDLC, including Git flow, CI/CD (especially GitLab CI), and containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Exceptional empathy for the developer experience; a product mindset where the "customer" is the internal software engineer.An understanding of the developer mindset, to ensure keen adoption of new tools and practices.
- Strong written communication skills, with the ability to write documentation that is easily parsable by both humans and LLMs.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and define standards in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.
- An awareness of cost implications in a cloud environment, and methods of optimising services for maximum ROI.
Bonus points if you have:
- Agentic workflows: Experience building or coordinating autonomous agents that can perform multi-step engineering tasks.
- Dev portal expertise: Experience with Backstage.io or other developer portals.
At Netcraft we strongly believe in individual growth and development. Even if you can't tick every box above right now, please don'tlet it put you off applying.
The reward package:
- Hybrid and flexible working options
- 33 days holiday per annum (incl. public holidays)
- Salary sacrifice pension with matched employer contributions up to 5% + NI savings
- Private health cover, including access to a private GP service
- Spot reward bonus scheme to reward truly outstanding contributions
- Comprehensive wellness and support provisions
- Enhanced family leave provisions
- Two days paid Volunteering Leave per year
- Free meals, drinks and snacks provided daily in the offices
- Regular social events such as board game nights, big summer party and annual kick-off
- Inclusive culture and environment, where you’ll feel genuinely valued and respected; and
- A tax-efficient cycle to work scheme.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
This is very important to us and through our ally network we actively support under-represented groups. We seek to maintain a working environment that is free from bias, harassment or discrimination and we encourage candidates from any background to apply, regardless of their gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, ability/disability, age, religion, or any other specific characteristics.
We’re happy to make reasonable adjustments to our hiring process to ensure that all candidates are able to participate fully and comfortably.
Please note Netcraft does not accept any unsolicited approaches from external recruiters.