Developer Relations Manager

Location: London, UK (Remote)

Department: Marketing

About this role

Developers increasingly choose infrastructure through direct evaluation, peer recommendation, and what AI assistants tell them - not search rankings alone. Were looking for a Developer Relations Manager to build Ablys presence, trust, and credibility with developers evaluating Ably AI Transport. Youll sit within the Marketing team, working closely with Developer Experience and Product.

This is a foundational role; Ably hasnt had a dedicated DevRel function in some time, and youll be building it back up from the ground. Youll be the voice of the developer inside Ably and the voice of Ably to developers: understanding whats genuinely driving or blocking adoption, and using that to shape our community presence, technical content, and product conversations. Youll use AI to move faster across research, writing, and experimentation, and you already have a credible voice in developer circles. At Ably, youll help create the conditions for our engineers and product people to build theirs too.

Day to day, you will

• Be the feedback loop between developers and Ably. You’ll talk to developers evaluating and using Ably AI Transport - through community engagement, conversations, and events - and turn what you hear into clear, specific input for Product and Engineering. Things like reconnection failures keep coming up in the LangGraph community or the Temporal objection keeps recurring across evaluations are the kind of signal that changes what we prioritise and how we talk about the product.
• Build a genuine presence in the Temporal and Vercel communities. You’ll show up where the right practitioners already gather: contributing real knowledge, engaging in technical debate, building relationships. You’ll also help create the conditions for Ablys engineers and product people to participate authentically alongside you.
• Turn insight into technical education. You’ll write guides, and demos that help developers solve real problems with Ably. Content will be specific, honest about failure modes, and written for the senior engineer evaluating Ably for production use.
• Help improve documentation quality. You’ll work with the DevEx and AI Transport engineering teams to keep technical content accurate and easy for developers (and AI coding assistants) to use, and flag the gaps that get in the way.

What success looks like

• Clear, specific developer feedback that visibly shapes what Product and Engineering build and prioritise, and in turn helps marketing and commercial teams tune messaging
• A credible, genuinely engaged presence in the Temporal community, growing into Vercel and other framework communities.
• Technical content and demos, grounded in real developer insight, that get shared without prompting and drive self-serve signups.
• Ably showing up accurately when developers ask AI assistants to support technical evaluations and builds.

Wed love to talk if you have

• Previous DevRel, developer marketing, or developer education experience at a developer-first infrastructure company.
• 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.
• Experience engaging directly with developers and turning what you hear into specific, actionable insight that changes what a product or engineering team does next.
• Experience building or growing a developer community, with a clear sense of what makes one healthy versus what makes one large.
• A genuine understanding of how developers evaluate and adopt new tools, including how AI assistants now shape that process.
• A track record of technical writing that developers actually read and share, and a natural inclination to voice your thinking in public (guides, opinions, technical takes). You love putting your work and ideas out there - its just how you operate, not something a role has to ask of you.
• A point of view on realtime infrastructure and AI development patterns, backed by enough technical depth to hold a credible conversation about where AI Transports session layer sits relative to orchestration frameworks like Temporal.
• Strong cross-functional instincts; comfortable collaborating across Product, Engineering and commercial teams.

Bonus points if you have

• An existing developer audience: a blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, or social following thats genuinely engaged.
• Direct experience with WebSocket infrastructure, pub/sub, or realtime APIs, or building AI products that need streaming and session management.