Director, Development - Platform Ext & Dev Experience

Lumin Digital is the digital banking platform of choice for credit unions and community banks across the country. As we scale our extensibility program, the Director of Developer Experience & Platform Extensibility will lead the team that makes Lumin the best platform to build on in the community financial institution (CFI) space.

This is a player-coach director role. You will set strategy, lead and grow a team of developers, and get into the work when it counts, whether that’s shaping SDK architecture, presenting to a prospect alongside Sales, or co-presenting roadmap at the SDK advisory council. You will partner closely with the extensibility product manager and together you will define and execute a roadmap that elevates Lumin’s developer platform to industry leadership.

• Own technical strategy and quality of Lumin’s SDK, ensuring it is well-documented, extensible, and designed for developer success.

• Partner with the extensibility product manager to shape the SDK and public API roadmap, GTM activities, and developer adoption strategy.

• Define and enforce SDK engineering standards, patterns, and best practices across the team.

• Build Lumin’s developer platform from the ground up, including sandbox environments, quick-start tooling, API explorer, and a DevEx portal that includes recipes, demo videos, and testing tools.

• Create and own the overall structure and content strategy for the developer documentation portal.  

• Champion developer experience metrics in partnership with the PM, including adoption rates, time-to-first-call, integration success, and developer NPS.

• Partner with Lumin’s data team to build a cohesive narrative around how FIs can use Lumin’s bulk data extraction capabilities in conjunction with the SDK to build powerful, data-driven applications.

• Help external developers and partners understand the full scope of what they can build on the Lumin platform, connecting the dots between data pipelines, APIs, Design System and SDK capabilities.

• Stay current on AI-assisted development trends and tools; champion their adoption within the developer community building on Lumin’s platform.

• Incorporate AI development best practices into SDK tooling, documentation, and the developer portal to help third-party developers build faster and smarter.

• Serve as Lumin’s technical face with external developers, clients, prospects, and vendor partners.

• Lead and co-present at SDK advisory councils, developer webinars, and roadmap sessions.

• Support Sales in occasional enterprise engagements (1–2 per month) as a developer platform SME; educate Sales Engineering and Solutions Consultants on how to position and demo extensibility.

• Work closely with SRE, Security, and Support teams to ensure infrastructure, access controls, and support processes align with the extensibility roadmap.

• Collaborate across product, engineering, and marketing to ensure the developer platform is integrated into Lumin’s broader go-to-market strategy.

• Inherit and lead an existing team of developers; set clear direction, grow their capabilities, and build a high-performing DX engineering function.

• Hire to expand the team as the extensibility program scales.

• Foster a culture of developer empathy, as the team builds for developers, so they should think like developers.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field. MS degree or MBA preferred.

• Demonstrated experience building and delivering developer platforms, SDKs, or APIs, with 8+ years of software engineering or related leadership experience.

• Strong engineering background with hands-on experience building or owning APIs, SDKs, or developer platforms.

• Experience building and managing technical teams in a player-coach model, able to set strategy and roll up your sleeves when the team needs it.

• Data-driven approach to developer experience, with fluency with metrics such as time-to-first-call, developer NPS, integration success rates, and adoption curves.

• Deep understanding of what great developer experience looks like, with strong opinions on documentation, sandbox tooling, onboarding, and community.

• Outstanding communication skills, equally comfortable in a whiteboard session with engineers, a roadmap presentation with clients, or a finalist sales meeting with a credit union CTO.

• Familiarity with the AI developer tooling landscape and ability to translate those insights into platform positioning and team practices.

• Naturally cross-functional, able to work fluidly with product, data, SRE, security, and sales without losing momentum.

• Experience in fintech, banking technology, or platforms serving financial institutions is a plus, but not required. Curiosity about the CFI space is.

• Minimal, generally 12 days or less per year, ~2X team get togethers a year

• Less than 25% - Up to 65 work days of travel per year for a full time employee