Developer Experience Lead

Responsibilities

• Act as the senior technical advisor to application teams that build and maintain custom software, helping them adopt the platform's source control, CI/CD, testing, dependency management, and security tooling.
• Study how teams build, test, and release software; find friction and bottlenecks; and recommend and drive improvements that speed delivery without weakening security, accessibility, or operational requirements.
• Turn enterprise standards and policies into clear, usable guidance, and bring teams' feedback and pain points back to platform and governance leadership.
• Build shared templates, starter repositories, example pipelines, and reusable components (golden paths) that let teams start new work quickly and consistently.
• Partner with platform, security, and operations engineers so developer workflows stay aligned with architecture, cybersecurity, and privacy requirements.
• Guide teams on adopting AI-assisted development tools safely and productively.
• Own the developer documentation and onboarding experience: best practices, coding standards, how-to guides, and onboarding paths.
• Run workshops, office hours, tech talks, and individual coaching to drive adoption of approved tools and practices.
• Define and track developer experience metrics (e.g., onboarding time, lead time, self-service rate, developer satisfaction) and use them to set priorities.
• Lead technical support and incident response for development teams, including hands-on Tier 2-3 troubleshooting when needed.
• Provide backup coverage for the pipeline engineering lead, software packaging, and the user experience designer.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field and 12+ years of relevant experience, or a Master's degree in one of these fields and 10+ years of relevant experience.
• 5+ years in software engineering, DevOps, or platform engineering roles, including hands-on work within the last 2 years with an enterprise source control and CI/CD platform (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, or Jenkins) and automated testing.
• 3+ years of UX engineering, UX design, or interaction design experience; this may include designing developer-facing products such as internal developer portals, self-service platform workflows, developer tools, or documentation sites.
• Experience leading adoption of shared tools or practices across multiple development teams, such as golden-path templates, an internal developer platform or portal, inner-source libraries, or an engineering onboarding program.
• Experience creating technical documentation and training, and delivering workshops, briefings, and mentoring for engineers.
• Experience in complex coordination across multiple project or product teams, including briefing senior technical and non-technical leaders.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust determination at the high-risk level; fingerprinting and a credit check are required before starting work.
• Ability to report on-site in the Washington, DC metro area with one business day's notice.
• Within the last 18 months, built golden paths on GitHub Enterprise: reusable GitHub Actions workflows, repository templates, and docs-as-code sites (e.g., GitHub Pages).
• Built or ran an internal developer portal or service catalog (e.g., Backstage) or a self-service platform workflow.
• Helped developers act on security findings from GitHub Advanced Security, SonarQube, JFrog Xray, or similar tools without slowing delivery.
• Defined and reported developer experience and delivery metrics (e.g., DORA, SPACE, onboarding time, developer satisfaction surveys) and used them to deliver a measurable improvement.
• Rolled out AI-assisted development (e.g., GitHub Copilot) with usage guidelines, human review, and measured results.
• Enabled dozens of product teams in a large enterprise or federal agency, including teams maintaining legacy or commercial off-the-shelf applications.
• UX research methods (user interviews, journey mapping, usability testing) applied to developers, and recent hands-on coding in one or more modern languages.
• Knowledge of Section 508 accessibility, secure coding practices (e.g., OWASP), and the NIST Secure Software Development Framework (SP 800-218).
• Certifications such as GitHub Foundations, GitHub Actions, GitHub Copilot, or GitHub Advanced Security; Certified Kubernetes Application Developer; or a recognized UX certification.
• Prior service as key personnel on a federal contract, an active Public Trust or other favorable federal background investigation, and residence in the Washington, DC metro area.