Developer Experience Lead

About Lead Bank

Lead is a banking infrastructure platform trusted by the most innovative companies to power complex financial products. We enable fintechs to offer compliant, programmable services like payments, lending, and digital assets at scale. Banking has moved beyond traditional institutions and is now embedded directly into everyday experiences, meaning companies need modern infrastructure that is safe, secure, and operationally sound.

Today, Lead is one of the only API-first, developer-focused partner banks with the financial, regulatory, and legal expertise required to help fintechs succeed. We operate offices in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, and New York City, and an FDIC-insured bank in Kansas City.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

At Lead, we believe the developer experience is part of the product. As our platform grows, the quality of that experience — how partners learn what's changing, integrate, and build with confidence — will become one of our greatest competitive advantages. This role exists to make building on Lead as intuitive and enjoyable as using the products we build.

We're looking for a Developer Experience Lead to own two connected surfaces end to end: our developer documentation, and the communications partners rely on to understand and prepare for platform change. From API references, guides, and changelogs to feature-rollout notices, deprecation timelines, and upcoming-changes announcements, you'll shape every touchpoint developers encounter as they build on and grow with Lead.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with real autonomy. You'll operate independently, own your roadmap, and be the single accountable owner for how partners experience documentation and change communication. It's also a role with runway: as the surface and volume grow, we expect this person to define the standards, processes, and — over time — the team that scales developer experience across the company.

If you're passionate about reducing complexity, treating documentation and communication as products rather than afterthoughts, and giving developers an experience they'll rave about, we'd love to talk.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Developer Documentation

- Own the strategy, roadmap, and day-to-day management of docs.lead.bank http://docs.lead.bank.

- Treat documentation as a product by continuously improving usability, discoverability, information architecture, and developer workflows.

- Build implementation guides, tutorials, diagrams, quickstarts, and reference documentation that reduce time-to-first-success for developers.

- Develop and maintain documentation standards, style guides, and editorial processes, including stewardship of the API Style Guide.

- Measure documentation effectiveness using search analytics, user feedback, and adoption metrics, and close the loop on what you learn.

- Collaborate with Product and Engineering early in feature development so documentation ships alongside releases, not after.

Partner & Release Communications

- Own the partner-facing communication surface for planned platform change: feature rollouts, deprecations, and breaking changes.

- Own the Changelog and Upcoming Changes page as the single source of truth for what's changing and when, keeping timelines current as they firm up.

- Steward the notice-period discipline for breaking changes — clear expectations, consistent lead times, explicit required actions.

- Run the intake-to-publish workflow: partner with Product and Engineering to capture the technical details, then edit for clarity, customer impact, and a single consistent voice before publishing.

- Ensure every partner communication answers, in order: what changed, why it matters to the partner, what they need to do, and where to learn more.

Technical Content & Developer Education

- Partner with engineers and product managers to translate complex technical concepts — including our object model and API design — into clear, developer-friendly content.

- Create onboarding guides, implementation playbooks, architecture diagrams, sample applications, and migration guides that help developers succeed faster.

- Support Product Marketing with technical thought leadership and educational content, and identify opportunities for guides, videos, and developer showcases.

AI & Documentation Operations

- Leverage AI to improve documentation creation, maintenance, quality assurance, and content operations.

- Build repeatable workflows that let Engineering and Product contribute documentation efficiently.

- Continuously improve the systems behind documentation and communications, not just the content itself.

- Evaluate emerging AI tools and documentation technologies to keep the developer experience ahead of the curve.

Building the Function

- Define the standards, processes, and operating rhythms that let a small team eventually support this surface without fragmenting quality or voice.

QUALIFICATIONS

- 6+ years across developer experience, developer education, technical writing, developer-facing product marketing, or related disciplines.

- Exceptional written communication with an obsession for clarity and usability, and the judgment to write calmly and precisely about change that affects partners in production.

- Able to read an API specification and reason about an object model — you understand the systems you're documenting, not just how to phrase them.

- Experience working closely with engineering teams and technical, API-first products.

- Strong product instincts and genuine empathy for developers.

- Experience with documentation platforms such as Mintlify, ReadMe, GitBook, or Docusaurus, and comfort with docs-as-code workflows and GitHub.

- Comfortable using AI tools to improve documentation and content workflows.

- A track record of setting standards and operating independently — evidence you can own a surface end to end.

Bonus if you've...

- Built documentation as a product and measured its quality through analytics.

- Owned developer or partner communications for platform change.

- Designed developer onboarding experiences or created reference architectures.

- Written SDK documentation or worked on API-first platforms.

- Worked in fintech, payments, or another regulated, high-trust domain.

SUCCESS IN THIS ROLE LOOKS LIKE

- Developers integrate faster, with fewer support requests.

- Documentation becomes a competitive differentiator for Lead.

- Partners always know what's changing before it ships, and trust the Upcoming Changes page as part of their workflow.

- Product launches and breaking changes ship with complete, consistent, high-quality documentation and communication.

- Engineering and Product treat documentation and partner communication as an integral part of the development lifecycle.

What we offer:

At Lead, we design our benefits to support company culture and principles, to foster an efficient and inspiring work environment, and to create the conditions for our team to give their best in both work and life

- Competitive compensation based on experience, geographic location, and role

- Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, 401k Matching, and other wellness benefits, including FSA, HSA and HRA

- Paid parental leave

- Flexible vacation policy, including PTO and paid holidays

- A fun and challenging team environment in a dynamic industry with ample opportunities for career growth

*Lead Bank is proud to have an inclusive culture committed to ensuring equal employment opportunity in all employment decisions regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, military status, veteran status or any other legally protected status.

*Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

*Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

*Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

*Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. Pay is based on a number of factors and may vary depending on geographical market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. These ranges may be modified in the future.

Zone 1: $185,000 - $220,000 (SF/Bay Area, NYC, Seattle)

Zone 2: $163,000 - $190,000 (Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Denver, Boston, Washington DC, San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, Sacramento, Miami)

Zone 3: $158,880 - $182,000 (Other US Metros)

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