Who I think is the perfect candidate for our new opening

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:00:00 -0000

So my team is hiring a Developer Advocate and I want to share with you what I think we need for the role.

NOTE
This is not meant to be disqualifying... I genuinely believe that if you want to apply, you definitely should for a many reasons including letting us know you exist in case you don't fit here but fit somewhere better in the future.

About Aiven and our team

The Aiven team works to provide amazing data storage and streaming services for customers of all sizes. Our bread and butter are open source data services like PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka and we make it easier for companies to focus on their applications while we focus on managing their data services. That's to we hope to be your favorite DBA's favorite DBA (if you got that reference, let me know).

Our team has shrunk significantly since I joined a year ago. That said we've really refined what we're capable of. Our DevRel team consists of two teams, Dev Educators and Dev Advocates. We are both responsible for things like creating content such as workshops, videos, blog posts, and other content. Our Educators are primarily responsible for organizing and coordinating our workshops while our advocates focus on bringing technical demos and presentations to our customers and folks in the communities of technologies that we represent.

My Optimal Candidate (the things that will make you stand out)

The person that I think that would best fit this role is someone that fills the gaps that we currently have. Basically we're currently a venn diagram missing one of its pieces and we hope that whoever is hired will be a large portion of that piece.

Content generator and recycler

We hope to really ramp up the amount of developer-focused content that we create on our website. That means being able to showcase new features on a regular basis.

We also hope to repurpose as much content as possible. That means that if you write a blog post, can you make it a video? Can you expand the concepts into a 60-90 minute workshop that you can give to our customers or at a community conference.

Internal feedback producer

I mentioned working on new features, we want to make sure that feedback is making its way back to our internal teams. I hope that when you're creating content and you hit some friction points that you can highlight those points and get that information back to our other teams so they can continue to improve our platform.

Open-source contributor (and community contributor)

We have an entire org of demos and examples that we expect to only get bigger. Knowing what we have and how we can use it for talks, demos, resources for documentation, and more is going to be crucial. Also making sure that things stay up to date and helping with some of the regular gardening in those repos is a big deal.

We also are investing time and energy in open source. Like, you can get paid extra for contributing to Open Source when off the clock and you even have time on the clock to contribute to the many open source projects we rely on! That goes beyond code because community contributions are equally as important.

Great with with devrel adjacent teams

We work a lot with our DevEx teams, Growth Marketing, PMM, Technical Sales Support, Technical Product Managers, Event marketing roles and OUR ENGINEERS, DBAs, and SREs. If you have some background in any of these roles and you're often the person being asked to communicate changes to others on those team, then you would be a great fit.

If you read all of this and said - "Yeah that's what a Developer advocate does." Then I really want you to consider applying.

Some specific technology requests

Okay, so I talked about a lot of the things that we're looking for in a candidate and I mentioned that they need to fill in the space on our venn-diagram. Here are some of the things that I think we're definitely missing.

TO BE CLEAR! YOU DON'T NEED ALL OF THESE THINGS, but we are looking for some of these gaps in our team to be filled. I'm not going to give you (years experience) because your comfort talking around topics in these areas is the more important piece.

Java

So our team is currently made up of Pythonistas who aren't afraid of some javascript. But Java is a different beast and we want to do right by it. Many of our customers and larger companies are using Java in 2025 and we hope that we can speak fluently to them.

Kafka

We really love open source data storage and streaming systems but one of our biggest technologies we provide is our Aiven for Kafka. It's the same great Apache Kafka with some amazing convenience coming from the Aiven Platform. We would love it if you can help us make realistic demos and speak to those knowledgeable with Kafka from a technology and implementation standpoint.

Data integration with AI tooling

Okay you knew this was coming. Many of our customers want to know how their tools integrate with AI. It's rarely as simple as "push the AI button" (although we do have some AI insights to help with query and index optimizations). This means that we need someone that can help people integrate their existing or new data with the constant influx of popular large language models, AI Agents, and more.

Regional restrictions apply

I would love to say "We can hire anywhere" but unfortunately that is not the case. We're looking for someone in our current working areas which is US/Canada (Central/Eastern Timezones) and in Europe. This is based on our ability to hire/employ in these regions.

Again this wasn't meant to be a limiter to folks applying. I really hope this reaches the best candidate and more than anything I want you reading this, YES YOU!, to consider how awesome it could be for us to work together.

If you're interested, consider applying and make sure you put "Jay Miller" in the How did you hear about this role section. Our team is pretty awesome and a great crew to work with.