Software Engineer (Developer Experience)

Job Description

We believe being together in person helps us move faster, align more effectively, and build stronger teams. Our approach includes spending at least two days a week in the office to support collaboration, decision-making, and shared ownership. 

We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our Developer Experience team in London. This is platform engineering at a scale that matters: the tools, portal, and golden path templates you build are what hundreds of ASOS engineers rely on to discover services, start new work, and get into production. Developer Experience owns Backstage, our developer portal, golden path templates, engineering metrics, and the AI tooling that is changing how engineers work every day. The goal is always the same: reduce the cognitive load on engineers so they can focus on building things that matter for the business. 

At this level your ownership sits at the feature and component level. You will take well-defined problems, make the technical decisions within them, and deliver to production with confidence. You will also have a real voice in shaping architectural and cross-team decisions, working closely with Senior Engineers and the Engineering Lead to influence the direction of the platform. 

In this role, you will own meaningful pieces of work across the Developer Experience platform. You'll build and improve features in Backstage, contribute to the golden path templates that hundreds of engineers depend on, and play an active part in embedding AI-assisted workflows into the developer toolchain. You'll work independently within established patterns, bring your own judgement to technical decisions, and grow your depth in platform engineering. Every improvement you ship is multiplied across every team at ASOS, returning time to engineers that would otherwise be lost to toil, setup, or unnecessary complexity. 

This is a role for an engineer who takes pride in the craft of building internal products and understands what makes it different from external-facing engineering: the people you are building for are your colleagues, and when you make their working lives easier, better, or faster, you feel it immediately. If you get satisfaction from that kind of direct, human impact, this is the right role. 

The primary customers of this team are the Product Delivery Teams across ASOS, and the measure of success is not just whether we shipped something - it is whether those teams adopted it, use it every day, and are delivering faster and getting more value into production because of it. 

Our north star is simple: a new engineer should be able to onboard into their team and get their first service into production without needing to ask anyone for help. That is what we are building. 

Within six months, a strong mid-level engineer in this team will have taken full ownership of at least one Developer Experience service or capability, shipped measurable improvements to portal adoption or template coverage, and built productive working relationships with product engineering teams across ASOS. 

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver features across Developer Experience services, primarily Backstage, golden path templates, engineering metrics, and developer productivity tooling. 
• Build and maintain Backstage plugins, catalogue integrations, and scaffolder templates that make it faster and easier for engineers to start new services and discover what they need. 
• Contribute to golden path service templates, ensuring they cover the most common ASOS service archetypes, support canonical languages and frameworks, and have security, observability, and CI/CD built in by default. 
• Work on DORA and engineering productivity instrumentation, helping the team collect and surface meaningful signals including deployment frequency, lead time, collaboration score, and developer satisfaction, so engineering managers have the data they need to identify where friction is slowing their teams down. 
• Help shape how Developer Experience thinks about agentic workflows - not just adopting tools, but rethinking how golden paths, system templates, and onboarding work when agents are part of the equation. You'll experiment with both GitHub Copilot and Claude workflows, document what you learn, and influence the team's direction on which approaches work best for which problems. 
• Contribute to the team's work on AI-assisted engineering adoption, working alongside OCTO (Office of the CTO) to help integrate GitHub Copilot and agentic AI capabilities into developer workflows and making sure the tooling lands where it will have the most impact. 
• Write high-quality, well-tested code using a test-first approach and contributing to a culture of engineering excellence within the team. 
• Participate actively in code reviews, giving and receiving feedback that raises the quality bar across the team. 
• Maintain and improve documentation-as-code surfaces so engineers across ASOS have clear, up-to-date guidance on how to use DevEx platform capabilities. 
• Contribute to the governance and self-service model that makes the platform scale - including the contribution model for golden path templates, the extension points that let teams customise without creating bottlenecks and working with Cyber Security to ensure compliance and access standards are embedded by default. 
• Engage directly with Product Delivery Teams as the primary customers of Developer Experience - understanding the friction they face, identifying where adoption of platform capabilities is low and why, and using those insights to drive improvements that make teams faster and more productive. This is where you will build the relationships and platform knowledge that give you real influence over what gets built next. 

Qualifications

These are the core skills we are looking for in this role. We do not expect every candidate to be strong across all of them - if you meet most of these and are genuinely curious about the rest, we would love to hear from you. 

• Strong programming skills in TypeScript/JavaScript or a primary backend language (C#/.NET, Node.js, or Go) with an understanding of modern idioms and patterns. 
• Confident with Git, branching strategies, and effective pull request practice. With a consistent track record of clean, well-structured code reviews 
• Experience writing unit and integration tests as a core part of your delivery workflow, not an afterthought. 
• Good working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines; you can write and debug pipeline configuration and understand what good CI looks like. 
• Exposure to DORA metrics, developer productivity measurement, or DevEx research methods. 
• Familiarity with observability and metrics visualisation tooling such as Grafana, or similar dashboarding platforms, with an interest in using data to understand and improve developer productivity. 
• Hands-on experience using agentic AI tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or equivalent) as a core part of your shipping workflow. You're comfortable using these tools for multi-step problems - refactors, test generation, framework migrations - and you understand what makes agents succeed or fail. You think naturally in terms of how to set up system context and patterns that help agents reason reliably about our codebases. 
• Azure platform fundamentals; you know your way around core Azure services and can work within a cloud-hosted environment. 
• A collaborative engineer who contributes positively to team dynamics, takes feedback well, and shares knowledge openly. 
• Proven experience working in an agile environment and within a product operating model, with a clear understanding of how product teams plan, prioritise, and deliver. 

We'd Love It If You Have 

• Experience with Backstage or other internal developer platform tooling, or a strong appetite to become the team's go-to on it quickly. 
• Comfortable with containers (Docker), including authoring images, multi-stage builds, and troubleshooting runtime issues. 
• Experience of platform engineering and platform product thinking - building shared internal capabilities that are depended on by multiple product teams and treating internal tooling as a product with engineers as your customers. 
• An understanding that building a great internal platform is only half the job - the other half is driving adoption across Product Delivery Teams and making sure the standard path is the one teams actually choose. 
• Experience with React and component-based frontend development. 
• An understanding of service catalogue concepts, golden path templates, or developer onboarding patterns. 
• Hands-on experience with GitHub Copilot, agentic AI workflows, or prompt engineering for code and specs. 

Additional Information

BeneFITS'

• Employee discount (hello ASOS discount!)  
• Employee sample sales 
• 25 days paid annual leave + an extra celebration day for a special moment  
• Private medical care scheme  
• Fixed Annual Payment in addition to your salary each year, it's just an extra thank you from us 
• Opportunity for personalised learning and in-the-moment experiences that enable you to thrive and excel in your role. 

Why take our word for it? Search #InsideASOS on our socials to see what life at ASOS is like.