At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $18 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy.
Team Mission 🚀
We're building a new Product Engineering Experience (aka Developer Experience) team with one goal: empower every product engineer at OakNorth to ship faster, safer, and with greater autonomy.
We do this by building platforms and partnering closely with product teams to understand friction, shape workflows and drive adoption of golden paths.
We believe the best developer experience is AI-native by design, not bolted on as an afterthought. Our team builds the tools, frameworks, pipelines, and automation that make it effortless for engineers to go from idea to production. Think AI-assisted local dev setup, intelligent CI/CD, self-service infrastructure, AI agents embedded across the SDLC to enable both technical and non-technical contributors and documentation that writes itself. We're a small, high-impact team distributed across the UK, India, and the EU, and we're looking for someone who wants to define what modern developer experience looks like inside a regulated fintech.
The role
You're the kind of engineer who gets frustrated when developers waste time on things that should be automated and then builds the thing that fixes it. You:
Have 4+ experience building developer tooling and internal platforms - you've created self-service systems, CLI tools, SDKs, or internal APIs, and iterating on them based off feedback and real-world usage to measurably improve developer productivity
Think AI-first when designing solutions - you think automation in terms of agents and workflows. Naturally reaching for LLMs, AI code generation, and intelligent automation as building blocks, not novelties.
Use AI tools daily to accelerate your work – whether it be forcoding, debugging, reviews or documentation, you’re well versed in leveraging AI to 10x your impact
Have strong end-to-end knowledge of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) - from discovery, planning, defining, coding, testing, deployment and operations. You understand how each phase connects and where friction hides, and you've used that understanding where to automate, streamline, and improve the entire flow, not just one piece of it
Are passionate about CI/CD and release automation - you've built or significantly improved build systems, designed deployment pipelines that give engineers confidence to ship continuously and understand dependency management
Measure your success in developer productivity, not lines of code - you care about DORA metrics, onboarding time to first commit, cycle time, and automation effectiveness. You've used frameworks like DORA, Core 4 or SPACE to drive measurable improvements
Understand the value of great documentation and onboarding - you've built or championed AI-automated documentation, self-updating runbooks, or knowledge-sharing systems that actually get used
Are comfortable working in a regulated environment - you understand that "move fast" in financial services means moving fast safely, with appropriate guardrails, audit trails, and compliance awareness
Embrace DevOps culture: You build it, you run it - you take end-to-end ownership and you're not waiting for someone else to deploy, monitor, or fix what you've built
Operate with strong opinions, held loosely - you bring a clear point of view on how developer experience should work but you listen, learn and adapt when the evidence says otherwise
Communicate clearly across distributed teams - you work effectively with colleagues across multiple timezones, write excellent and clear documentation, and default to transparency
It would be an added bonus if you:
Have worked at a fintech, bank or other regulated business
Have experience building or customising developer portals (e.g., Backstage or similar service catalogues)
Have integrated tools like GitHub Copilot, LLM APIs, or AI-powered code review into real engineering workflows
Have experience with AI-powered risk detection, intelligent test generation or AI-assisted code review at scale
Technology
Python
LLMs & AI tooling (we're outcome-driven and vendor-agnostic)
PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigQuery
TypeScript, React
AWS, GCP
Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions
