Developer Relations Manager

## About the role 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, and 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 - Own Ably's technical education programme. You'll write quickstarts and guides that teach developers how to solve real AI problems with Ably. Not just how to use the API. Content will be specific, honest about failure modes, and written for the senior engineer evaluating Ably for production use, not the newcomer following a getting-started guide. - Be a credible presence in the communities that matter - and bring others with you. You'll identify the developer spaces where the right practitioners already gather and show up in them genuinely: contributing real knowledge, engaging in technical debates, building relationships. But you won't be the only Ably voice. You'll create the conditions (playbooks, prompts, removing friction) that make it easy for Ably's engineers and product people to participate authentically too. The goal is Ably represented across multiple credible voices in the spaces that matter, not just one. - Feed developer intelligence across Ably. You're closest to developers before they sign up - in communities, at events, through content. You'll aggregate what you're observing: which problems keep surfacing publicly, which framework communities are hitting the pain AIT solves, what objections are appearing consistently, where Ably is absent from conversations it should be in. That intelligence flows to DevEx, Product, AI Transport engineering and to sales and marketing (who own the outreach and re-engagement decisions). Your job is pattern recognition and signal aggregation, not account tracking. Specific, actionable patterns e.g. "three developers in the LangGraph community hit reconnection failures at scale this month" or "the Temporal objection is coming up independently across multiple evaluations" are the outputs that change what sales prioritises and what docs and DevEx teams build next. - Contribute to documentation quality. You'll work with the DevEx and AI Transport engineering team to ensure technical content is LLM-parseable, accurate, and structured for how developers actually use it. You'll identify gaps that AI coding assistants surface when they try to implement Ably, and advocate for fixing them. ## What success looks like - Ably appears accurately and consistently in LLM responses when developers ask about realtime infrastructure, AI streaming, or pub/sub - measured and tracked. - Ably is a known and respected presence in the communities where AI product developers hit streaming failures, session continuity problems, and multi-agent coordination issues at scale - Temporal, Vercel AI SDK, and framework-specific forums. Not just mentioned, but genuinely engaged with before developers have even started evaluating solutions. - Technical content that developers share without prompting, and that drives measurable self-serve signups. - AI coding assistants - Cursor, Copilot, Claude - that correctly recommend and implement Ably when given relevant problems. - A personal brand with a genuine developer audience that follows you, not just Ably's corporate accounts. - Named, specific developer feedback that directly influences product and documentation decisions. ## We'd love to talk if you have - 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. Not documentation for documentation's sake. Content that earns trust. - Experience building or growing a developer community, with a clear understanding of what makes one healthy versus what makes one large. - Genuine understanding of how developers evaluate and adopt new tools, including how AI assistants now mediate that process. - A point of view on realtime infrastructure, AI development patterns, or developer experience that you'd be comfortable defending in public. - Enough familiarity with orchestration frameworks (Temporal and Vercel in particular) to articulate clearly where AIT's transport and session layer sits relative to state management and orchestration. This objection surfaces independentl