Developer Experience Engineering

Remove friction so your engineers spend time shipping product, not fighting tools. DX improvements compound — faster onboarding, higher flow state, lower cognitive load, better retention.

faster developer onboarding

40%

fewer internal support tickets

200+

engineers onboarded to Backstage

2 hrs

from hire to first commit

Overview

Engineering Productivity as a Product

Developer experience is the sum of every interaction your engineers have with their tools, processes, and platform. Slow onboarding, absent discoverability, manual toil, and tribal knowledge locked in Slack threads — each friction point costs hours every week per engineer, compounding across your entire org.

We've led DevEx teams and driven Backstage adoption at global engineering organisations. We know which investments deliver measurable productivity gains and which ones just look good in engineering all-hands slides. Our engagements start with a DX audit to find the actual pain points — not the assumed ones — and prioritise by impact-to-effort ratio.

Capabilities

What We Deliver

Internal Developer Portals

  • Backstage deployment, configuration, and custom theme
  • Software catalog: automated ingestion from GitHub, GitLab, and Jira
  • Tech radar for technology standards communication
  • Service templates: scaffolding new services with first-class CI/CD built in
  • Custom Backstage plugins for internal systems (DORA dashboards, on-call status)

CLI Tooling

  • Go CLIs with Cobra: environment setup, service scaffolding, deployment helpers
  • Interactive TUI workflows with Bubbletea for complex multi-step operations
  • Cross-platform distribution via Homebrew, binary downloads, or Docker
  • Configuration management: YAML/TOML files, environment inheritance
  • Integration with internal APIs, Vault, Kubernetes, and cloud CLIs

Onboarding Automation

  • Self-service environment provisioning: cloud credentials, Kubernetes access, VPN
  • Automated access grants for GitHub, Jira, Slack channels, and internal tools
  • Day-one runbook generation with team-specific tasks and contacts
  • Local development environment setup automation (devcontainers, Nix flakes)
  • New starter tracking dashboard for engineering managers

Upskilling & Enablement

  • IaC workshops: Terraform from zero to custom provider
  • Shell scripting and Bash automation for developers
  • Go programming: idiomatic patterns, concurrency, testing
  • DevOps fundamentals: containers, Kubernetes, observability
  • Inner-source contribution culture and ADR writing workshops
How We Work

Our Approach

01

DX Audit

Developer surveys, onboarding shadow sessions, and tooling inventory to build a friction map of the actual pain points — not assumed ones.

02

Prioritise by Impact

Rank friction points by engineering hours lost per week. Focus the first sprint on the highest-impact, lowest-effort improvements to show early wins.

03

Build & Roll Out

Tooling built with developer input, piloted with a volunteer team, and rolled out org-wide only after the early adopters confirm it solves the problem.

04

Measure & Iterate

DORA metrics, NPS surveys, and support ticket volume tracked before and after. Iterate based on real data, not assumptions.

Technology

Stack & Tools

Go (Cobra) Backstage TypeScript React GitHub Actions GitLab CI Terraform Kubernetes AWS Prometheus Grafana Devcontainers Nix Bubbletea
When to Engage

Is This Right for You?

New engineers take two weeks to become productive

At 10 hires a year, two weeks of onboarding friction is 20 engineer-weeks lost annually. Automated onboarding and a Backstage portal can cut this by 60-70%.

Senior engineers spend hours each week answering "where is X?" questions

A Backstage software catalog with automated catalog ingestion makes service ownership, dependencies, and documentation discoverable without interrupting anyone.

Knowledge is locked in Slack history and two key people's heads

Inner-source culture, ADR-first decision making, and a Backstage portal with docs-as-code integration distribute institutional knowledge before it walks out the door.

Your team uses IaC but nobody on the team fully understands it

Terraform workshops — from fundamentals to writing custom providers — turn infrastructure consumers into infrastructure contributors and reduce platform team bottlenecks.

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Ready to invest in your engineers' productivity?

Tell us your engineering org size and where developers lose the most time. We'll scope a DX audit and recommend the highest-ROI starting point.