Overview

Our everyday digital experiences are in the middle of a realtime revolution: chatting alongside a livestream, getting realtime financial updates, or working with colleagues in a shared online space. Consumers now expect realtime as standard, and Ably powers a large part of it.

We put developers first. Our products help teams build, extend, and deliver realtime digital experiences, delivering over 700 billion messages to more than 2 billion devices every month. Teams at HubSpot, Fin, Dialpad, NASCAR, Sportsbet, and General Motors all build on Ably.

Working at Ably means helping build the infrastructure that will shape the next generation of the internet. More of what people do online is becoming live, shared and interactive, which only makes what we build more relevant and more necessary. AI is the latest place that shows up. There’s still so much to build, and we’d like your help with it.

About This Role

Thousands of developers around the world use Ably’s SDKs and APIs to power realtime features in their applications. The Developer Experience team is responsible for ensuring that Ably is a platform that exemplifies great developer experience, and is a reference point that other companies aspire to.

As our Senior Developer Experience Writer, you’ll be contributing directly to this goal, sharing your expertise to teach developers how to design and build scalable, efficient realtime applications, using our APIs and SDKs. You’ll help developers create reliable, well-designed realtime features that stand up to scale, and interact with the community to understand what’s missing for them.

This is a modern take on technical writing; you’ll be using AI to both increase your own output, whilst multiplying the velocity of other contributors. The same core values still apply though, ensuring that users can quickly understand and succeed with Ably.

Day to Day You Will

  • Use AI to produce quality content. You’ll write reusable prompts and skills that docs contributors can use to ensure their content meets our standards. We want you to improve our scale and pace without sacrificing accuracy and a human touch.
  • Define and uphold content standards. You’ll help define what great looks like; from docs structure and style to making sure that PRs aren’t a bottleneck to scale.
  • Build engaging educational content templates. You’ll lead by example by producing reference content that others can use as a pattern to write similar content. You’ll focus on content that can help transform users to experts.
  • Empower engineers to write great content. You’ll coach and support engineering contributors to ensure that they’re always producing accurate and high-quality documentation and other technical content.
  • Champion effective AI use. You’ll promote the use of AI for efficiency, while maintaining a sharp eye for quality ensuring content is accurate, clear, and aligned with our standards. This means experimenting with AI tooling and sharing learning and patterns that others can adopt.
  • Maintain and elevate the docs platform. You’ll take responsibility for shaping the documentation platform’s components, structure and tooling. Using analytics and feedback to drive enhancements that keep the docs perfectly aligned with developer needs.

We’d Love to Talk If You Have

  • Proven success creating educational content for developer audiences, ideally API and SDK docs, guides and tutorials.
  • Experience writing accurate, clear, and concise content for a developer audience, as well as reviewing and giving feedback to contributors.
  • Experience thriving in an AI-forward environment where AI tooling is an embedded part of your process.
  • Fluency with JavaScript. You have habits that make AI a core part of your workflow.
  • Confidence with modern web development tools and frameworks and a basic understanding of how code works.
  • Strong instincts for developer experience, particularly API design.
  • Experience working in a proactive, self-directed way in distributed or remote teams.
  • Experience of working in a startup or growth-stage company (ideally B2B SaaS).
  • A portfolio of technical writing or educational content, ideally for developer audiences.

Bonus Points If You Have

  • Experience in maintaining and shaping a documentation platform or developer portal.
  • Familiarity with information architecture principles and content strategy.
  • Familiarity with git-driven workflows for managing content changes.
  • Some knowledge or understanding of event-driven architecture.

What’s It Like to Work at Ably?

You’ll join a team of around 60 people, working directly alongside senior engineering and leadership. No layers, no bureaucracy, and real ownership from day one.

Remote-First

We hire the best people, wherever they happen to live. We’re not just a remote company that happens to hire engineers, we’re a remote-first company that deliberately lets everyone work remotely. We hire people regardless of where they are, as long as they’re in a timezone that works for Ably (which mostly means a European timezone).

Remote-first comes with trade-offs. On one side: flexibility, no commute, long stretches of focus time. On the other: fewer impromptu coffees, and you have to over-communicate to stay in the loop. As our only recruiter, you’ll need to manage your own time and stay close to the hiring managers and candidates you work with.

We really mean it when we say we do the best work with trust. We hire smart people, so we trust them to do a great job. That’s why we meet in London twice a year, in winter and summer.

Our six values shape how we work day to day:

  • Open for all. We default to sharing openly: source, decisions, and feedback, with open minds to match.
  • Tech needs humanity. We build with empathy, for colleagues and developers alike.
  • Even the best do better. We keep raising our own bar, driven by curiosity, not complacency.
  • Bias for action. Once we know enough to act, we act, rather than waiting for certainty.
  • Dependable by default. We take real ownership of what we ship and what we promise.
  • Bold creativity wins. We treat big constraints as a reason to think differently, not less.

You can read more about how we defined these values on our blog, and see the team behind them on our careers page.

Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals are what make us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to our long-term success. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background, or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to it.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems, we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’re happy to give you advice on your application.

What You’ll Get

  • A remote-first and flexible work environment. Our London office (next to Old Street) is there whenever you want it. Aside from our company get-togethers, you’re welcome to work wherever suits you best.
  • Equity. We’re a growing start-up, and we want everyone to share in the company’s success through our EMI share options programme.
  • Enhanced holiday allowance: 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday).
  • Enhanced parental leave, so you can spend time with your new family member: up to 16 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary, depending on length of service.
  • A home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 per year after that), so your home office serves you well.
  • A personal learning and development budget of £1000 a year, plus 5% L&D time during working hours to build your skills.
  • Private healthcare with BUPA.
  • A medical cash plan covering a range of medical and dental costs.
  • Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
  • A monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
  • Life assurance and income protection.
  • Access to Tech and Cycle to Work schemes.
  • Annual leave allowance for your chosen “Need to Know” question.