Developer Experience Engineer III
Description
Developer Experience Engineer III
Location: Hybrid
Department: Engineering – Platform Team
Reports To: Architecture Manager
Department: Engineering – Platform Team
Reports To: Architecture Manager
About the Role
Here at Open Lending, we are forming a new Platform Team with a mission to accelerate our software engineers, reduce cognitive load, and create an outstanding developer experience. You will be a founding individual contributor in this area, responsible for setting the foundation, creating the roadmap, and delivering high-impact initiatives that make our developers more productive, confident, and empowered.
This is a hands-on, senior-level IC role where you will balance strategic vision with tactical execution. You’ll partner closely with engineering leadership, product teams, and other platform engineers to modernize, streamline, and enhance every part of the development lifecycle—from onboarding to deployment. AI tooling expertise is a must, as we aim to embed intelligent automation and developer-assist features into our workflows.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and own the Developer Experience Roadmap for the Platform Team, aligned with organizational goals.
- Design, build, and maintain internal developer platforms that simplify and standardize development workflows.
- Integrate and champion AI-powered developer tools (e.g., AI-assisted code generation, intelligent code review, automated documentation).
- Continuously evaluate emerging AI development tools and APIs for integration into developer workflows.
- Establish best practices, patterns, and reusable tooling for CI/CD pipelines, local development environments, and cloud-native deployments.
- Reduce cognitive load by abstracting complexity in infrastructure, testing, and release management.
- Drive self-service capabilities for engineers to provision environments, run tests, and deploy without heavy manual intervention.
- Partner with product teams to optimize feedback loops, ensuring faster iteration cycles and higher-quality releases.
- Measure and improve DORA and developer productivity metrics, using data to inform improvements.
- Lead internal developer education and enablement initiatives, ensuring all engineers can leverage new tools and processes effectively.
- Evaluate and implement security, compliance, and observability best practices into the developer workflow.
- Ensure responsible and secure use of AI-powered tools in accordance with organizational AI governance policies.
- Advocate for and contribute to an engineering culture of continuous improvement.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in platform, developer experience, or DevOps-related roles.
- Proven track record of delivering developer productivity and platform engineering initiatives at scale.
- Strong background in CI/CD, cloud-native development (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
- Expertise in AI-powered development tooling (e.g., GitHub Copilot, OpenAI API integrations, AI-assisted testing frameworks).
- Solid understanding of software delivery metrics (DORA, SPACE framework) and how to improve them.
- Proficiency in at least one major programming language (Java, Go, Python, or similar) and modern infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, etc.).
- Experience setting up new platform or DX functions from scratch and influencing technical direction.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, able to bridge gaps between infrastructure teams and product engineers.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in multi-team engineering organizations where developer enablement was a core focus.
- Familiarity with Team Topologies and developer cognitive load reduction strategies.
- Prior work integrating observability, monitoring, and logging into developer-facing systems.
- Experience with event-driven architectures and microservices.
- Hands-on experience with secure software supply chain practices (SBOMs, artifact signing, etc.).
What Success Looks Like
- Month 1–2: You have established the initial developer experience baseline, gathered feedback from engineers, and work with leaders to define a clear roadmap.
- Month 3: Show us what you’re capable of by delivering a few quick wins.
- Month 4-6: Execute on the first wave of developer experience improvements (e.g., AI-assisted workflows, faster value delivery, improved onboarding) are adopted across teams.
- Year 1: The developer platform is widely used, DORA metrics show measurable improvement, and engineers report significantly reduced friction in daily workflows.
Why Join Us
- Opportunity to build a developer experience function from the ground up.
- High impact—your work directly accelerates the velocity of our entire engineering organization.
- Collaborative, forward-thinking culture that values automation, continuous improvement, and AI innovation.
- Competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and a strong commitment to work-life balance.