INSERT INTO Yugabyte (We’re Hiring Developer Advocates)

It has been an exciting last few weeks here at Yugabyte! We closed our Series B funding round, Bill Cook (formerly of Pivotal and Greenplum) joined as our new CEO, we reaffirmed our commitment to open source, and achieved a bunch of cool community adoption milestones. We are hiring for several roles across engineering, customer success, and marketing. Particularly, with a new round of funding and exploding interest in Distributed SQL, combined with the rapid adoption of YugabyteDB, we feel like the time is right to expand our Developer Advocate team with several new hires.

New to YugabyteDB?

YugabyteDB is an open source, high-performance distributed SQL database built on a scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner. Yugabyte is PostgreSQL wire compatible with support for triggers, stored procedures, secondary indexes, and other advanced RDBMS features.

In this post I want to dive a little deeper into what a Developer Advocate is, what skills we are looking for, and encourage anyone for whom “developer advocacy” is a passion to apply. As someone who bootstrapped themselves into tech 25 years ago without any formal training or experience, I am especially keen in speaking to folks from traditionally underrepresented groups or backgrounds. If you are currently a Developer Advocate and know someone in your network who would be a great fit, please encourage them to apply or reach out to me over LinkedIn.

Please Note: Health and safety remain a top priority for us. As such, all Yugabyte interviews are held virtually, so we can all continue doing our part with social distancing.

What exactly is a Developer Advocate at Yugabyte?

Having managed developer advocacy teams at both startups and publicly traded companies in the past, here’s how I’d define what a developer advocate is:

A Developer Advocate at Yugabyte puts themselves in the position of an application developer, database administrator, or open source contributor and interacts with YugabyteDB from those vantage points to better understand what works, what’s needed, and what needs fixin’.

By empathizing with these personas as a starting point, it helps a developer advocate easily identify what sort of content and experiences need to be created (or optimized) so community members can be successful with their projects using YugabyteDB.

For example:

As a Spring developer, I want to build microservices that make use of a cloud native database like YugabyteDB, so that my whole tech stack can take advantage of the CNCF and Kubernetes ecosystem.

As a database administrator, I want to understand the Day 2 best practices around YugabyteDB, so I can ensure the system’s uptime, scalability, performance, security, and recoverability in the event of a disaster.

As a YugabyteDB contributor, I want to push fixes, file bug reports, interact with community members, publish content, and speak at events, so I can help promote the power of open source to transform how software is developed, distributed, and adopted.

What does it take to be a Developer Advocate?

Here are some of the attributes I have seen that most successful developer advocates share:

Developer Advocates empathize with community members. They never see themselves as outside the community or “just passing through.” They are active members who believe in the ability for the technology to help solve big problems and are invested in the success of the community. They also respect the fact that some members are experts while others are admitted newbies. Developer Advocates love to help everyone succeed, at any skill level or background.

Developer Advocates love to share knowledge. They are naturally wired to proactively network with people who can help them share knowledge in whatever format is most effective, including blogs, papers, videos, presentations, sample apps, and more.

Developer Advocates are curious. They tend to spend their free time doing things like working on their own software projects, podcasting, writing about tech, learning new languages/tools, attending or organizing Meetups, filing bugs, and contributing code to open source projects that interest them.

What areas of expertise should a YugabyteDB Developer Advocate possess?

In the coming months we want to focus on adding value to communities where we believe distributed SQL has a lot to offer. Specifically, we are looking for applicants who have expertise in the following areas:

• Cloud Native and Kubernetes-centric technologies
• GraphQL development
• Java/Spring development, especially microservices
• SQL (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc.)

Anything else I need to know about the role?

Can Developer Advocates be remote? Although we are based in Silicon Valley, we are looking to hire exceptional US-based folks wherever they reside.

What if I have no experience as a Developer Advocate? No big deal. Your GitHub profile, blogs, presentations, videos, and active participation in community Slack channels and forums speak louder than any job title ever will.

I am interested! Where do I apply? Apply here or send me a connect request/message over LinkedIn.

Yugabyte is also hiring for other positions!

We also have other open positions in our Customer Success, Engineering, and Marketing teams. Check out our July 2020 hiring blog post for what’s currently open, and visit our careers page for open positions as they evolve.