Developer Engineer; DevEx

Location: Remote

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

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.

We are looking for an experienced and forward‑thinking Developer Experience Engineer (Dev Ex) to join our Engineering team and help us shape and deliver the next generation of Arbor’s developer experience. The remit and focus of the role is to build the tools, templates, and automation that improve how our engineers design, build, and deploy software, securely and efficiently. You will play a key role in establishing our Internal Developer Platform (IDP), standardising engineering workflows, embedding AI‑assisted development, and strengthening our secure‑by‑design culture through close collaboration with the Dev Sec Ops  function.

It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge – if you’re a collaborative and highly technical candidate, this is the role for you.

Core responsibilities

• Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
  • Design, build, and maintain Arbor’s IDP, providing self‑service tooling, consistent build pipelines, and standardised deployment workflows.
  • Develop project scaffolding and templates that allow engineers to rapidly bootstrap new services with best practices built in.
  • Integrate core engineering systems (CI/CD, observability, service catalogue, documentation) to provide a joined‑up developer experience.
  • Collaborate with the Platform Engineering and Dev Sec Ops  teams to ensure the IDP embeds security scanning, dependency management, and compliance controls by default.
• AI‑Enabled Developer Productivity
  • Embed AI‑assisted tooling (e.g. Claude Code, Codex etc) into the developer workflow.
  • Partner with the Head of Developer Productivity to define and measure AI efficiency metrics.
  • Develop plugins, workflows, or integrations that help engineers use AI tools safely and effectively.
  • Contribute to the continuous improvement of AI onboarding, training, and developer enablement.
• Tooling & Workflow Standardisation
  • Consolidate and rationalise the engineering toolchain, ensuring consistency across teams.
  • Build automations and command‑line utilities to streamline repetitive development tasks.
  • Maintain and improve shared build/test/deploy templates and scripts.
  • Collaborate with teams to identify pain points in the development lifecycle and propose solutions.
  • Collaborate with Dev Sec Ops  to build and maintain reusable secure coding templates, CI/CD guardrails, and compliance checks.
• Metrics & Continuous Improvement
  • Contribute to the collection and reporting of developer productivity data (e.g. build times, PR cycle times, deployment frequency).
  • Support automation and observability for key developer metrics.
  • Participate in post‑implementation reviews to quantify the impact of new tooling or process changes.

• Strong background in software engineering (hands‑on experience with modern backend or full‑stack development).
• Experience designing and building developer‑facing tooling, pipelines, or platform components.
• Familiarity with Internal Developer Platforms (e.g. Atlassian Compass, Backstage, or similar).
• Practical experience with CI/CD systems (Git Hub Actions, Jenkins, Circle
  
  CI, etc.) and cloud‑native deployment (AWS preferred).
• Understanding of AI‑assisted development tools and enthusiasm for driving adoption in a structured, measurable way.
• Working knowledge of Snyk or…