Developer Experience Engineer (George) at Datafin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

• One of South Africa’s leading insurance providers is looking for a Developer Experience Engineer to join their team. They are building a Platform Engineering practice, and developer experience is central to that effort.
• They are implementing Backstage as their internal developer portal, creating templates for new services, and building the self-service capabilities that let developers focus on building rather than fighting infrastructure. This role is about making the platform so good that teams actually want to use it.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Implement and maintain Backstage as their internal developer portal
• Build the service catalogue so developers can discover what exists and who owns it
• Create golden path templates: “start a new API service” should take 5 minutes, not 5 days
• Design software templates that enforce their standards while staying flexible
• Write documentation that developers actually read (yes, it’s possible)
• Build self-service capabilities: environment provisioning, secrets management, config updates
• Implement TechDocs so documentation lives with code and stays current
• Create developer productivity dashboards and track metrics that matter
• Gather feedback from developers and turn complaints into improvements
• Run enablement sessions and training when they roll out new capabilities
• Contribute to software development and platform engineering tasks, including coding, debugging, and optimisation where it improves developer experience outcomes.
• Build and maintain internal tools, scripts, and services that enhance developer productivity and reduce friction.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to write and review production-quality code aligned to platform standards and best practices.
• Support integration and automation efforts across the platform, contributing code where required to enable self-service capabilities.
• Assist with refactoring and improving existing systems and tooling to align with modern engineering practices.
• Participate in code reviews, testing, and continuous improvement initiatives within the platform engineering team.

REQUIREMENTS:

What You Bring

• You’ve worked on internal developer tools or platforms before. You understand the unique challenges
• 3+ years software development experience
• Backstage experience or similar developer portal platforms (Port, Cortex, OpsLevel)
• Strong TypeScript and React skills (Backstage frontend is React)
• You understand developer workflows because you’ve been a developer
• Technical writing skills. You can explain complex things simply
• Empathy for developer experience. You notice friction that others accept as normal

Education

• Degree or Diploma in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Relevant certifications in cloud platforms, DevOps, or developer tooling (Azure preferred) will be advantageous.
• Equivalent practical experience improving developer workflows, tooling, and platform adoption will also be considered.

Nice to Have

• Experience building CLI tools or VS Code extensions
• Knowledge of the Backstage plugin ecosystem
• Experience measuring developer productivity (DORA metrics, developer surveys)
• Training or facilitation experience
• You’ve evangelised platform adoption to sceptical teams