Lead Developer Advocate

At SmartBear, we deliver the complete visibility developers need to make each release better than the last. Our award winning and industry favorite tools TestComplete, Swagger, ReadyAPI, BugSnag, and Zephyr are trusted by over 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers at 32,000+ organizations – including world-renowned innovators like Adobe JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. 

This is an exciting time for us. We’re growing globally, moving fast, and we need passionate people who want to help us shape the market. You will have the opportunity to work for an established company that moves at the speed of a startup, remains flexible and open to new ideas.  If you think this is a good fit, let us get to know you. 

Our employees are our foundation. SmartBear is built upon a diverse group of passionate, innovative, and collaborative individuals located across four continents. The SmartBear values are Smart, Open, Drive, Accountable, and Curious.  Learn more about the SmartBear values here: https://smartbear.com/company/careers/ . 

To build and extend SmartBear’s success and growth, we’re looking for a skilled DevRel that has market and technical expertise. 

Position Summary: 

Use deep market knowledge, engaging technical content, persuasive presentation, and storytelling skills to show the endless possibilities of creating unique value with both open source and commercial offerings at SmartBear. 

You will play a crucial role in developing and supporting the strategy and message to empower and energize our current communities and users in addressing deployment challenges through technology. In the dynamic landscape of the digital world, characterized by the widespread adoption of mobile apps, web apps, APIs, cloud-native technology, and the increasing importance of observability, your focus will be on ensuring a developer-first insight-driven approach to application development and operation.

In this role, you will work closely with the observability teams, emphasizing the importance of standards like OpenTelemetry. Your goal is to enable our customers and internal teams to tackle application development and deployment challenges with a quality and security-focused process. 

By embracing a developer-centric observability mindset, you will contribute to streamlining the entire development lifecycle, from the initial stages through deployment and beyond, ensuring a seamless and efficient insight-driven experience for all stakeholders.

Being a key member of SmartBear’s Developer Relations team, you will create relationships with community leaders, influencers and (technical) partners. 

This is a highly technical role with the mission of engaging and inspiring the broad community of developers. Public speaking will be a part of your job and you will become one of the public faces of the company. 

What you’ll do: 

• Show thought leadership and expertise by producing videos and authoring tech blogs, white papers, best practices guidelines, educational content, and other assets for both internal stakeholders as well as customers and partners.
• Deliver persuasive technical presentations during events around the world and through online channels.
• Create sample applications, prototypes, and integrations.
• Build trust through active engagement with the developer community, learning about their successes and challenges, and advocating for their needs.
• Continuously keep up to date with latest open source and commercial observability and OTel trends.
• Monitor the technical community for trends, best practices, and enablement needs.
• Define, and create technical enablement material for internal technical audiences.
• Drive technical engagement and early adoption with community, committers, customers and partners leading to open source project commits, product enhancements, and customer wins.
• Support Product Marketing with a compelling message and go-to-market strategy/execution, while helping to define and implement strategies for measuring community growth initiatives across the OTel space and related communities.
• Collaborate with Engineering/Product teams in driving critical initiatives.
• Bring kindness and empathy for the community to help them tackle their issues.
• Assist, if called upon, for product marketing assets, product demos, industry analyst meetings, and high-level consulting.

DevRel can expect to: 

• Support the go-to-market strategy, messaging, and knowledge sharing towards internal and external audiences to ensure that the message permeates SmartBear as well as the marketplace.
• Advocate for community and customer needs with other teams inside of SmartBear.
• Support enablement of internal pre-sales, solution architects, and support services staff.

Candidate with proven technical experience in: 

• Logs, Metrics, Traces, OpenTelemetry, Distributed Tracing, Monitoring, Container Orchestration, and Cloud Platforms.
• Market trends and optionally be an open-source project maintainer or contributor.
• OTEL APIs and/or SDKs.
• Proficient in at least one programming language.

Candidates demonstrate non-technical experience: 

• 3+ years in a senior (or leader) developer relations role.
• Superior communication and storytelling skills both written and spoken with an ability to articulate key messages clearly and explain technical concepts to a wide variety of target audiences, including non-technical and deeply technical audiences.
• Demonstrated experience working with developer communities, software applications, observability technologies, and APIs (or microservices).
• Active member of one or more observability communities, with knowledge of the culture, key influencers, and industry events.
• Experienced and engaging presenter and speaker.
• Results-oriented; committed to quality of product and service.
• Ability to work in globally distributed (virtual) teams and being committed to driving teamwork and collaboration.
• Deliver work both independently and collaboratively.
• Ability to travel to attend global events, meetings, and conferences. 

Why you should join the SmartBear crew: 

• You can grow your career at every level. 
• We invest in your success as well as the spaces where our teams come together to work, collaborate, and have fun.
• We love celebrating our SmartBears; our crew to get their birthdays off.
• We celebrate our differences in experiences, viewpoints, and identities because we know it leads to better outcomes.  

Did you know? 

• Our main goal at SmartBear is to make our technology-driven world a better place.  
• SmartBear is committed to ethical corporate practices and social responsibility, promoting good in all the communities we serve. 
• SmartBear is headquartered in Somerville, MA with offices across the world including Galway Ireland, Bath, UK, Wroclaw, Poland and Bangalore, India. 
• We’ve won major industry (product and company) awards including B2B Innovators Award, Content Marketing Association, IntellyX Digital Innovator and BuiltIn Best Places to Work.

SmartBear is an equal employment opportunity employer and encourages success based on our individual merits and abilities without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, ancestry, mental or physical disability, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, medical condition, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy (which includes pregnancy, childbirth, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding), or any other legally protected status.

• You are asked for personal or financial information early in the hiring process.
• There is pressure to move forward quickly or to make payments for any part of the application process.
• The listing or communication appears on unofficial channels or from unverified sources.

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