Developer Relations Manager

About this 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, you will

• 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