[Hiring] Developer Relations Manager @Ably

Role Description

Developers no longer start a product evaluation on Google. They ask Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity - and they get an answer in seconds. The blog post, the tutorial, and the documentation that used to earn a developer's trust through search rankings now has to earn it through AI intermediaries and peer recommendation first. That's the shift this role exists to respond to.

We're looking for a Developer Relations Manager to own Ably's presence, trust, and credibility in developer spaces - before a developer ever signs up. You'll sit within the Marketing team, working closely with the Developer Experience and Product teams, and your job is to make Ably AI Transport genuinely known and respected among the developers who evaluate realtime infrastructure:

• Through technical education that earns trust.
• A respected presence in the communities where the right developers already are.
• Content that gets shared without prompting.
• The kind of LLM visibility that means Ably comes up accurately when a developer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation.

This is a complementary role to our Developer Growth Manager, who owns the developer journey from sign-up through activation and expansion. Your focus is everything upstream: the content, community, and credibility that brings developers to the door in the first place. You will work closely together. Your work feeds their funnel.

This is an AI-forward role. You'll build content structured for LLM ingestion, create reference implementations that AI coding assistants learn from, and use AI to move faster across research, writing, and experimentation. You already have a personal brand, a credible voice in the developer community. At Ably you will create the conditions for Ably's engineers and product people to build theirs too. The goal is a company where technical opinions come from many voices, not one.

Day to day, you will:

• Own Ably's technical education programme.
• Write quickstarts and guides that teach developers how to solve real AI problems with Ably.
• Be a credible presence in the communities that matter - and bring others with you.
• Feed developer intelligence across Ably.
• Contribute to documentation quality.

Qualifications

• A technical background, you can write real code against an API, read a technical architecture, and hold your own in a conversation with an engineering team.
• A track record of technical writing that developers actually read and share.
• Experience building or growing a developer community.
• Genuine understanding of how developers evaluate and adopt new tools.
• A point of view on realtime infrastructure, AI development patterns, or developer experience.
• Familiarity with orchestration frameworks (Temporal and Vercel in particular).
• Experience using AI as a core part of your workflow.
• Strong cross-functional instincts.

Requirements

• Building AI products that require streaming and session management.
• An existing developer audience: a blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, or social following.
• Experience structuring documentation or content for LLM ingestion.
• Familiarity with product analytics and activation funnels.
• Previous DevRel, developer marketing, or developer education experience at a developer-first infrastructure company.

Benefits

• A remote-first and flexible work environment.
• Equity through our EMI share options programme.
• Enhanced holiday allowance of 28 days of paid annual leave.
• Enhanced parental leave package.
• Home workstation budget of £500 on joining.
• Personal learning and development budget of £1000 annually.
• Private healthcare with BUPA.
• Medical cash plan to cover a range of medical and dental costs.
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
• Monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
• Life assurance and income protection.
• Access to Tech & Cycle to Work schemes.
• Weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week “Need To Know” meeting.
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.

Company Description

We’re tackling planet-scale problems and our ambitions are a testament to that. You’ll join a successful, deeply motivated and collaborative team that thrives on innovation, experimentation and autonomy. To get a sense of life at Ably, visit our careers page. You can also read about the origins of Ably's core values on our blog.

We believe in fostering a culture that's built on inclusivity and mutual respect among all team members, and we recognise that each individual is different and will want to be supported in their role in different ways. We provide a range of perks and benefits to aid folks' development and wellbeing, allowing them to be their best selves and do great work.