Developer Relations Lead/ Community Lead (Open Source)
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Technology built in the open lasts longer and travels further. Our client is an open-source advocacy and capability-building platform. It helps companies build the open-source way: training, advisory on open-source policy, strategy that aligns commercial goals with open principles, and frameworks for genuine community participation, the real kind, where the community shapes direction and the company is accountable to it. ABOUT THE ROLE
You'll be the day-to-day face and voice of the our client's community: technically credible, embedded in developer culture, and focused on turning a quiet community channel into a genuinely active, peer-driven network. The community exists to serve two purposes: converting technically strong developers into future customers of our tech stacks, and surfacing talent for our internal teams, but the trust only holds if participation is real and mutual.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Show up as a peer in developer spaces such as GitHub, Reddit, and long-form technical threads, contributing real code and technical input, not marketing copy
- Rebuild community engagement from one-way broadcast into genuine peer-to-peer activity: seed discussions, recruit community leaders, get developers answering and teaching each other
- Encourage our own engineers and technical team to actively share knowledge, updates, and resources into the specific community, building genuine two-way exchange rather than one-way broadcast
- Identify and cultivate relationships with strong open-source and hackathon-circuit developers
- Quietly assess community members who might be a fit for our talent pipeline, and manage those conversations one-on-one and discreetly
- Plan and run a small number of high-quality hackathons (one to two per year) rather than high-frequency, lower-value events
- Shape the community's public presence and define requirements/direction for supporting marketing execution
- Introduce our tech stacks to the community in a credible, non-salesy way, and gather real developer feedback on them.
Requirements
- Six or more years of hands-on coding experience, and genuine standing in developer communities (open-source) contributions, hackathon involvement, active presence in dev-native spaces)
- Experience organizing or leading a developer community yourself, such as a meetup, local chapter, open-source project, or online community. We're looking for someone who has already earned trust and visibility in developer spaces, not someone who is asking to be granted access to them
- Fluency in developer documentation and how experienced engineers actually work and communicate
- A track record of being trusted by developers as one of their own; this community will disengage fast from anyone who reads as corporate or extractive
- Comfort operating with a lot of autonomy and ambiguity; this role is being built from a loose framework, not a fixed playbook
- Experience in a formal developer relations, dev advocate, or community lead role at a technical company
- Involvement in a formal community leader program (for example, X's Developer Community Leaders Program) or similar organizer-level standing in a developer ecosystem
- Familiarity with how developer relations functions at scale (companies like Twitter/X, Meta are useful reference points, not a requirement to have worked there); connections made through developer relations circles, including ones as far-reaching as Montreal, can be a strong signal of real community standing.
Originally posted on