DevRel (Developer Relations)

Also known as: Developer Relations, DevRel Engineer, Developer Advocate, Developer Evangelist, Head of DevRel.

What does a DevRel do?

A DevRel is a specialist who builds the company's relationship with the developers who use its product: helps them get started quickly, grows a community around the product and brings their feedback to the product team. Usually this is an engineer who can write and speak, so the work is a mix of code, writing and conversation.

• write tutorials, code samples and demo apps, and improve the documentation;
• speak at conferences and meetups, run streams and webinars;
• answer developers in the community, on GitHub, Discord or Slack, and work out where they get stuck;
• collect feedback and bring it to the Product Manager and engineers as concrete problems;
• measure how developers discover the product, start using it and stay.

When does a company need a DevRel?

A company needs a DevRel when developers buy or choose the product and growth depends on how quickly they adopt it: devtools, APIs, cloud and infrastructure services, open source with a commercial edition, AI platforms. Common triggers: the product has a free tier or open source, but sign-ups do not turn into active use; engineers spend their time answering the community; marketing cannot talk to developers in their language. The first DevRel is often an engineer who already speaks and writes. The role will not work if the product is sold to executives through a sales team and developers do not choose it: there a Solutions Engineer brings more value.

DevRel vs marketing: what's the difference?

A DevRel differs from marketing in working towards developers' success with the product rather than lead volume: they teach, answer and fix the user journey rather than promote. Marketing owns reach and the funnel; DevRel owns getting a developer to a working integration and getting them to tell others about it. What sets a DevRel apart from a Solutions Engineer is scale: a DevRel works with the community, a Solutions Engineer with a specific customer in a deal.

DevRel vs related roles: comparison

Why is it hard to hire a DevRel?

A DevRel is hard to hire because you need an engineer who enjoys speaking and writing, and such people are rare in both engineering and marketing.

• Companies use the DevRel title for very different jobs, from content writer to an engineer building SDKs, and candidates do not understand what they are applying for.
• Strong engineers rarely want to speak every week and answer chats, while good speakers often fall short on code, and the community sees it immediately.
• DevRel results are hard to measure, so a CV rarely shows whether someone influenced product growth or simply published a lot.
• Well-known DevRels are usually tied to their community and technology and are reluctant to move to a product they do not believe in.

What to decide before hiring a DevRel?

• What should be different in a year? Activation of new developers, community size and documentation quality are different goals, and each needs a different profile.
• Who will the DevRel report to: product, engineering or marketing? This determines what they will be asked to do, and the wrong choice often turns a DevRel into a post writer.
• What technical level do you need? Writing code samples and building an SDK are different depths, and asking for both at once means a very long search.
• Does the product already have a community, or does it need to be built from scratch? Launching a community and growing an existing one are different tasks and different experience.

Where to find a DevRel?

DevRels most often come from companies that sell to developers: cloud platforms, API companies, devtools, databases, AI platforms, open source projects with a commercial model; some grow out of engineering, Solutions Engineering and technical writing. A strong signal in a profile is public work you can judge: talks, articles, repositories with examples, activity in the community around a technology. NEWHR looks for these candidates by the results of their work, not by responses to a job post.

How to assess a DevRel in an interview?

A DevRel is assessed with a practical task: a short tutorial or demo on the company's product that the candidate prepares and presents as at a meetup, plus a technical conversation with an engineer. On the company side, the manager the DevRel will report to usually takes part, along with the product's lead engineer and the Product Manager.

Strong signals:

• finds the product's rough edges during the demo and suggests what to fix;
• explains complex things simply without losing technical accuracy;
• talks about the results of past work through developer behaviour, not view counts.

Red flags:

• cannot answer a technical question beyond the depth of their own talk;
• measures success only in posts, talks and followers;
• has not tried the company's product before the interview.

How long does it take to hire a DevRel?

We present the first candidates for the DevRel role within 5–7 days of the brief.

Related roles

• Solutions Engineer — helps a specific customer adopt the product as part of a deal.
• Technical Product Manager — decides what to build in a product for developers and gets feedback from DevRel.
• Content Engineer — builds a content production system rather than relationships with a community.
• Growth Lead — grows the product's key metric through experiments across the funnel.
• GTM Engineer — automates sales and marketing rather than work with developers.