How to land a job as a developer advocate

Call it what you will: developer advocacy, developer relations, developer experience… (I tend to use all these terms more or less interchangeably.)

If you’re interested in this line of work, I want to help! My goal here is to share everything I know about how to begin your career in developer advocacy.

By the end of this piece, you should have a better understanding of:

What does a developer advocate do?

The titles vary as widely as the actual roles themselves, between and within companies of all shapes and sizes.

I view my role at MUI as someone who primarily serves as a liaison between engineers and the users of their products. What I mean by that is, I act as the voice of the company to the users, and the voice of the users to the company.

I try to assess the needs of the users to find ways that we can improve the product. I also act as an alpha user for new features and components, and help engineers answer questions like “what should we name this new thing?”

At MUI, where I was brought on as the company’s first developer advocate, the products are open-source React UI component libraries. In practice, the documentation is the product to a large extent, because it’s the thing that all users will have to… use… 😅 continuously as they’re building with the components.

If the docs don’t solve the vast majority of the user’s problems, then the product is useless, and they’ll seek an alternative.

With this in mind, I spend the majority of my time working on improvements to MUI’s labyrinthine product docs. I look for holes, gaps, and inconsistencies, and I try to formulate better descriptions and new demos to explain key concepts. I put a lot of thought into the developer’s journey through the documentation and how the info is presented, and constantly try to inhabit the perspective of a new user who’s encountering all of this stuff for the first time.

Much of my time is spent tinkering with code snippets, and researching UI design patterns and best practices for accessibility so I can provide users with the most useful information and the best possible experience of our product documentation.

Because MUI is an early-stage startup, I tend to wear a lot of hats from day to day. I run the company social media accounts, as well as the monthly email newsletter that I launched. I created and maintain the company style guide, and wrote all the documentation on how to write good documentation. 😁

In 2023, MUI is planning to attend several international conferences, and I’ve taken the lead on planning and logistics. I am very excited to attend my first in-person tech conferences in Miami, San Francisco, and Amsterdam later this year.

MUI is growing, and we’re looking to hire a second developer advocate to join my team. I’ve been reviewing resumes as they come in over the last couple months, and it’s helped me to gain a much better sense of what employers want to see in a prospective new hire.

How to get a developer advocate interview

Developer advocacy is a highly interdisciplinary role, which is to say that an ideal candidate is likely to have professional experience in more than one adjacent role, such as:

Because of this, developer advocacy is often a career path that folks pivot to over time, rather than beginning there on day one. Still, if it’s something you’re interested in, you can focus your job search on these related roles to gain the experience you’ll need to get into developer relations down the line.

Most candidates I observe are either developers who enjoy teaching and writing, or writers/creators who specialize in tech content. In my case it was the latter: I spent many years as a freelance writer and editor in a few non-tech fields before learning web development in 2020. I got my hands dirty as a freelance web dev building front ends for a scrappy marketing agency startup, then joined Hashnode as a content strategist in 2021 before entering the world of developer advocacy in 2022.

When you look at my resume, you see:

That was enough for me to pass the initial sniff test and land a phone screening with MUI.

When I review resumes, I’m generally looking for experiences (in some capacity) in at least two out of the five related roles I listed above. Maybe you’re a front-end developer with a really solid technical blog that you write in your spare time, or a community manager who makes YouTube videos about web dev, or a technical writer who understands SEO and copywriting as well as JavaScript and React—these are all examples of people I’d want to interview for the job.

This should go without saying: do not use generative AI for any part of your application. I guarantee it will be extremely obvious, and in my eyes it’s grounds for immediate disqualification from a communications-based role. How am I supposed to judge how well you’re able to communicate if you rely on generative predictive text to talk about yourself and your past experiences? It ain’t a good look.

How to get a developer advocate job offer

Once you pass the initial resume check, there are three main things we try to assess through the interview process:

The way these assessments play out can vary from candidate to candidate, because each person brings their own unique background and skill set to the table. We might want to do a technical challenge, but your past work experience might be all we need to see; same goes for writing and communication skills. In my case, I completed a (take-home) technical challenge to demonstrate my knowledge of React, while my published work was enough to prove my skills in that area.

One of the most important traits we look for is what you might call charisma or charm. In order to serve as the voice of a company, you need to possess the kind of presence and presentational skills that will make people want to listen to you. As with any skill, it’s something that can be learned with practice over time; but it’s something I that a would-be developer advocate should’ve already been cultivating through prior work experiences (which might not be related to tech at all).

Another thing that’s important to me—especially because MUI is a small, open-source startup—is that the candidate has at least a vague vision for how they could best contribute. What facet of developer advocacy interests you the most? What ideas do you have for new or different things we could do to improve the product and provide a better experience to our users? At MUI the daily work is largely self-directed and asynchronous, so I need to know that you’re thinking about how your piece contributes to the whole.

Putting it all together

If you’re a sharp communicator who enjoys talking to people about code, writing about code, teaching about code, and helping users solve problems and build solutions with code, you could have a really sweet career ahead of you in developer advocacy (or relations, or experience, or evangelism, etc. etc. etc.).

That said, it can be a tough role to land—regardless of your seniority status as a developer. A developer advocate needs to be able to understand, articulate, and find ways to ameliorate the problems that developers face. That’s tough enough when you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt, but it could be too steep of a challenge if you’re brand new to the industry.

If it’s a career path you’re interested in pursuing, you can set yourself up to pivot over the course of a few years by gaining experience in a couple of the related roles that I listed earlier in this piece.

If you’re a developer who writes a tech blog or makes YouTube videos; or a technical writer who contributes to open source and participates in hackathons; or a dev-focused community manager who’s successfully grown a social media audience around a tech product; you will absolutely be able to land some developer advocate interviews once you have a year or two of experience on your resume.