Head of Developer Relations

About This Role

The Head of Developer Relations owns how developers discover, learn, adopt, and champion Fireworks. You build and lead the team that turns Fireworks into the platform developers reach for first when they want to build, fine-tune, and serve frontier open models in production. You set the strategy, run the programs, and build the team that makes our developer community the most informed and most active in AI infrastructure.

You will cultivate developer communities everywhere developers actually are, across the properties we own and the ones we do not, and in person at the events that matter. You will build a team of developer advocates who are genuinely in tune with the frontier and can become credible, hands-on experts in the newest AI developments faster than anyone else in the market. The field moves weekly. Your team has to be one step ahead. 

The right person is a builder and an operator who is equally comfortable shipping a demo, speaking on a conference stage, recruiting elite advocates, and reporting developer health metrics to the executive team. You think about developer relations the way a great product leader thinks about a product: who the user is, what they need, how they adopt, and how you measure it.

Reports to: SVP Marketing

Location: Remote (US) with periodic travel to San Mateo HQ and to key events

Location and Work Style

This role is remote-friendly within the US. You will travel to our San Mateo HQ periodically for team onsites and planning, and you will travel regularly to the conferences, hackathons, meetups, and partner events where the developer community shows up. We will establish a cadence that works for the team and the role.

Responsibilities

Developer Community, Owned and Unowned

You cultivate Fireworks developer communities across every surface where developers gather. On our owned properties, that means our docs, blog, examples, cookbooks, Discord, forums, and developer newsletter. On properties we do not own, that means showing up with credibility and consistency on GitHub, X, Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, and the open-source projects our developers depend on. You meet developers where they are instead of waiting for them to come to us. Success is measured by community growth, engagement, and the share of developer conversations in our category where Fireworks shows up.

In-Person Events and Field Presence

You own the in-person strategy that builds real relationships at scale: hackathons, workshops, meetups, conference talks, sponsorships, and developer dinners. You decide where Fireworks shows up, what we say, and who delivers it, and you measure whether it drives durable adoption rather than vanity attendance. You and your team are on stages and at booths, and you build a repeatable playbook so field presence compounds instead of resetting every quarter. Success is measured by qualified developer relationships generated and downstream activation from events.

Building and Leading the Advocate Team

You hire, develop, and lead a team of developer advocates who can become credible experts on the newest models, techniques, and tools fast. You recruit for raw technical curiosity and learning velocity, not just existing followings, and you build the operating system that keeps the team current as the frontier shifts week to week. That includes a fast-learning loop for new model releases and research, clear ownership areas, content and speaking standards, and a culture where advocates ship and learn in public. Success is measured by team output, the credibility and reach of individual advocates, and how quickly the team produces authoritative material after a major AI development.

Technical Content and Developer Education

You own the content engine that helps developers go from first touch to production: tutorials, quickstarts, reference apps, benchmarks, video, and deep technical writing on inference, fine-tuning, and serving open models. The bar is content that a senior engineer respects and that a new developer can follow. Success is measured by content reach, time to first successful build, and developer-reported usefulness.

Developer Advocacy into Product

You are the voice of the developer inside Fireworks. You channel friction, feature requests, and unmet needs from the community back to product and engineering with clarity and evidence, and you close the loop with developers when we ship. Success is measured by the quality of the developer feedback signal and its influence on the roadmap.

Measurement and Developer Funnel

You instrument the developer journey from awareness through signup, first build, and active production usage, and you report developer health to the executive team with definitions everyone trusts. You connect DevRel activity to adoption rather than treating it as unmeasurable. Success is measured by leadership confidence in the developer metrics and by adoption and retention lift attributable to DevRel programs.

What Success Looks Like

• Fireworks is consistently present and credible across owned and unowned developer properties, not just our own channels
• A repeatable in-person events playbook is driving qualified developer relationships and measurable downstream activation
• A high-caliber advocate team is in place and is reliably first to ship authoritative content when a major model or technique drops
• The developer funnel from awareness to production usage is instrumented and visible in shared dashboards