Developer Advocate

About Kestrel Labs

Kestrel Labs builds tracing tools for engineers who have to debug systems nobody fully understands. We are remote-first, around 130 people, and a good deal of our growth has come from engineers recommending us to other engineers rather than from advertising. Developer relations reports into marketing but spends most of its week with the product and docs teams.

What you'll do

• Write the technical content that engineers actually finish reading: instrumentation guides, migration walkthroughs, and honest post-mortems of things that went wrong.
• Build and maintain small reference applications that show Kestrel working in realistic conditions, in at least two languages we support.
• Speak at conferences and meetups roughly once a month during the season, and run our online workshop series the rest of the year.
• Act as the route back into the company for community feedback, turning recurring complaints into issues that product will genuinely look at.
• Improve our documentation in partnership with the docs team, especially the first fifteen minutes of a new user's experience.
• Maintain our open source instrumentation libraries, including triaging issues and reviewing outside contributions with some patience.

What we're looking for

• Four or more years in developer relations, developer education, or a software engineering role where you did a lot of writing and speaking.
• Real engineering background. You should be able to instrument a service, read a flame graph, and debug why the sample app is not reporting.
• Published writing or recorded talks you can point us at. Quality matters more than volume.
• Judgement about what deserves promotion and what does not. We would rather publish less and be trusted.
• Willingness to travel for around six to eight events a year, subject to your own preferences and constraints.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry or another observability ecosystem.
• Experience running a community forum, Discord or Slack without it becoming a support queue.
• A second language you are comfortable presenting in.

Benefits

• Health insurance, or a local cash equivalent where we cannot provide cover directly.
• Annual learning and conference budget, plus paid time to attend.
• Home office setup allowance and a hardware refresh cycle.
• An async-first culture with no standing daily meetings.

Compensation for this role is benchmarked by location and shared in full during the first conversation. To apply, email us with a short note about what you would want to write first and links to two things you have made.