Developer Relations Engineer - JavaScript

There are a lot DevRel jobs where you have to make your own fun, because the product is about eliminating some gnarly business slog like inventory management or expense tracking or underwriting. We’re not knocking those jobs! There’s nobility in eliminating slogs!

But this isn’t one of those jobs. We’re doing something big, something that’s about software development itself. We’re one of a number of upstart companies rethinking the public cloud, breaking down infrastructure problems that used to take months of work and dedicated headcount into a platform that our users can gain fluency with in a matter of minutes. If you’re our kind of developer, the fun in this job is built-in.

We’re looking for people who are passionate about JavaScript. On the client, on the server, or even on the microcontroller. Whatever framework you like: we support you, even though we still don’t understand how you can know what `this` is.

Folks working in DevRel at Fly.io interact with three different groups of people:

• Group A: our product teams, like in every other devrel job: the people building the platform and its features.
• Group B: our “framework” teams, which are a fun quirk of Fly.io: these are small teams of people organized around individual application frameworks like Rails, Django, Phoenix, and whatever people are doing in Javascript these days.
• Group H: the “developer community”, a term the industry uses because it is apparently squicked out by the word “customer”.

As a DevRel engineer here, your whole deal would be connecting the groups, per this schematic diagram:

You’ll accomplish this by deploying all of your “skills of an artist”, hopefully including things like:

• Quickly building proof-of-concept applications that show off cool things about Fly.io, like how quickly you can start up a new VM, or the timeless elegance of our IPv6 addressing.
• Building and delivering presentations for events, presentations that have the net effect of customers (err, the developer community) liking us more. Also, having the good taste to do this in ways that are interesting even to people who might never deploy an app on Fly.io.
• Talking to people working on all kinds of applications, from side projects to large teams building microservice ensembles, and talking them through making the best use of Fly.io, the Fly Machines API, our integrations with products like Supabase, that sort of stuff.
• Maintaining a public presence in online communities where developers congregate, and somehow doing all of this while maintaining your own authenticity and credibility. We’ll help!
• 25% monthly travel (focusing on small local meetups to medium sized conferences) to hang with developer communities in person to build authentic developer interest in various regions and communities.

This Role Is A Good Fit For You If:

• You enjoy building applications and are particularly psyched about the prototyping phase of building things, because there’s going to be a lot of that here.
• The idea of a little bit of chaos appeals to you, because it’s a sign to you that there’s an opportunity to help define a new practice and make some big moves.
• You’re opinionated enough to be interesting, but exceptionally good at listening, empathizing, and rolling with the opinions of our users. That’s a hard tradeoff and not a lot of us here can do it!
• Your career goals involve increasing your public profile. We punch above our weight in getting attention from developers, and your job here would be part of building and expanding on that.
• Going to a bunch of different developer events sounds like a good time to you. We are focused on in-person events as our strategy.

You’ll Know You’re Succeeding If:

• The numbers are going up and to the right (or you’ve built a time machine and can make the numbers go left).
• More JavaScript apps are launched on Fly.io.
• You’re involved in helping systematize our content development past blog posts and documentation and into a library of different kinds of content to connect with people at different phases of their use of the product, and you’re seeing results.
• You’re comfortable with how Fly.io intersects with all the major app frameworks and can effectively talk people through solving problems, and when you do that, the result is that people are excited to use us.

More Details

This is a fully-remote, full-time position.

In order to optimize for pay equity, Fly.io doesn’t negotiate salaries. We have standardized salaries for each employee level. The salary for this role is, depending on level, $134k or $190k USD. We offer competitive equity grants with a long exercise window. US employees get health care, everyone gets flexible vacation time (with a minimum), hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff.

Our hiring process may be a little different from what you’re used to. We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent. So instead of resumes and interviews, we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it, with “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet. (We’re happy to talk, though!)

If you’re interested, mail jobs+devreldotjs@fly.io. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like. Please also include 1. your location, 2. your GitHub username, and 3. your favorite industry euphemism for “customer”, so we know you’re not a bot.