Developer Relations Manager

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Whether chatting alongside a livestreaming event, receiving realtime financial information, or working with colleagues in an online collaborative environment - consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. At Ably we’re not just witnessing this revolution, we’re powering it - at scale.

At the heart of our mission lies a commitment to putting developers first. Ably provides a suite of products to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime, delivering billions of messages for millions of devices every day and supporting organizations like Harness, EA, Panasonic and HubSpot.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of the internet. The opportunity in front of us is immense. And we’d like your help.

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 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 independently in technical evaluations and needs a technically credible answer, not a marketing one.
• Experience using AI as a core part of your workflow - for research, writing, content structuring, and experimentation.
• Strong cross-functional instincts: you're comfortable working across marketing, product, and engineering without being owned by any of them.

Bonus points if you have

• building AI products that require streaming and session management.
• An existing developer audience: a blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, or social following - that is genuinely engaged.
• Experience structuring documentation or content for LLM ingestion (llms.txt, GEO, answer engine optimisation).
• Familiarity with product analytics and activation funnels. You don't need to own the data, but you should be able to read it.
• Previous DevRel, developer marketing, or developer education experience at a developer-first infrastructure company.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

We’re tackling planet-scale problems and our ambitions are a testament to that. You’ll join a successful, deeply motivated and collaborative team that thrives on innovation, experimentation and autonomy. To get a sense of life at Ably, visit our careers page. You can also read about the origins of Ably's core values on our blog.

We believe in fostering a culture that's built on inclusivity and mutual respect among all team members, and we recognise that each individual is different and will want to be supported in their role in different ways. We provide a range of perks and benefits to aid folks' development and wellbeing, allowing them to be their best selves and do great work.

• A remote-first and flexible work environment. UK-based teams come together in person once per month in our London hub (next to Old Street) and we get together as a company twice per year. Aside from that, you’re welcome to work wherever suits best for you.
• Equity. We’re a growing start-up and we want all team to members to share in the success of the company through our EMI share options programme.
• Enhanced holiday allowance. Our policy provides Ablyans with 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday).
• Enhanced parental leave package, so that you can take the time you need to get to know your new family member, rest and recover.
• Home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 p/a thereafter), so that your home office is set up to serve you well and that you have everything you need to work comfortably.
• Personal learning and development budget of £1000 annually, and 5% L&D time during working hours to focus on improving your skillset.
• Private healthcare with BUPA.
• Medical cash plan to cover a range medical and dental costs.
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
• Monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
• Life assurance and income protection.
• Access to Tech & Cycle to Work schemes.
• Weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week “Need To Know” meeting.
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.