Developer Experience Team Lead

Overview:

Berkeley Hunt has partnered with a high-performance financial technology firm to hire a Developer Experience Team Lead to oversee and scale their internal developer platform. This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure, tooling, and developer productivity, working closely with engineering teams to improve observability, reduce friction and drive platform adoption across a complex Java and C monorepo environment.

This role is hybrid at either their Chicago or New York City offices.

Who You Are:

• You are a hands-on engineering leader with a strong operational mindset, you've built and run developer platforms in production, not just designed them.
• You think deeply about developer experience and measure success by the productivity and happiness of the engineers you serve.
• You have a strong background with Bazel and monorepo tooling, and understand the challenges of supporting large-scale Java and C builds at speed.
• You're comfortable operating across on-prem and cloud environments and can make pragmatic trade-offs between the two.
• You have a track record of improving observability across complex systems and know how to turn metrics into actionable insight.
• You're genuinely excited about AI tooling and can speak credibly about how to reduce friction for engineers working with LLMs, not just using AI yourself, but enabling others to do so effectively.
• You lead with a user-centric approach, treating internal engineers as your customers and holding yourself accountable to their outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of 4–5 engineers, with broader influence across a platform organisation that report into a senior infrastructure leader.
• Own the internal developer platform end-to-end, build tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and internal infrastructure that enables engineers to ship faster and more reliably.
• Drive adoption and improvement of Bazel-based build systems across a large-scale Java and C monorepo.
• Define and execute the observability strategy, building out metrics, logging, and alerting frameworks that give engineering teams real-time visibility.
• Champion AI tooling adoption across the engineering org, identify, evaluate, and integrate tools that reduce developer friction, including MCP-compatible tooling.
• Partner cross-functionally with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to balance velocity with reliability and security.
• Establish and enforce platform engineering standards, ensuring consistency, performance, and operational rigour across on-prem and cloud environments.
• Contribute to the firm's technical roadmap and represent platform concerns at the leadership level.

Requirements:

• Proven experience running and supporting a developer platform for a large engineering organisation, ideally supporting Java and C at scale.
• Strong hands-on experience with Bazel and monorepo architecture.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD, build systems, and internal developer tooling.
• Experience operating across both on-prem and cloud infrastructure.
• A user-centric approach to platform engineering — you build for your internal customers.
• Ability to speak credibly about AI tooling and its application to developer productivity, including awareness of emerging patterns like MCP.
• 2–3 years in an engineering leadership or team lead role, with a track record of growing engineers and delivering platform improvements.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Background in proprietary trading, quantitative finance, or similarly high-performance engineering environments.
• Experience with observability platforms and a track record of building robust monitoring frameworks.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms and hybrid on-prem/cloud architectures.
• Passion for open source tooling and contributions to the broader developer ecosystem.