Head of Developer Strategy

Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That's the power of data in motion in action-giving organizations instant access to the massive amounts of data that is constantly flowing throughout their business. At Confluent, we're building the foundational platform for this new paradigm of data infrastructure. Our cloud-native offering is designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can create a central nervous system to innovate and win in a digital-first world.

We're looking for self-motivated team members who crave a challenge and feel energized to roll up their sleeves and help realize Confluent's enormous potential. Chart your own path and take healthy risks as we solve big problems together. We value having diverse teams and want you to grow as we grow-whether you're just starting out in your career or managing a large team, you'll be amazed at the magnitude of your impact.

About the role

Developers sit in the heart of Confluent's strategy, with the whole company heavily influenced by our open-source roots. The Office of the CTO is in many ways the personification of this. A strategic team that enjoys an elevated position in the organization, reporting directly to the CEO.

As Head of Developer Strategy, you will be directly responsible for how the company engages with the developer world, from the simple process of learning about Kafka and data-in-motion right through to pushing the boundaries of modern application design. You have a growing team at your disposal and a single clear objective: to captivate the Kafka world and show them a path to Confluent.

Want to know more?

The team has created a lot of material, but the best place to start is dev.confluent.io.

What you'll do

• Build a strategy that puts Confluent in the center of the developer ecosystem. If that sounds daunting, we have some ideas, but it's your strategy to develop and to own. The strategy needs to be comprehensive, from the first interactions-learning about Kafka and Confluent and how to get started with the technology - right through to building complex event-driven applications with Confluent Cloud.
• Grow the team. Build out a hiring pipeline, define the interview process, attract great talent, and ensure we hire the best thought leaders in the industry
• Engage organization-wide. The Office of the CTO is a cross-functional team closely aligned to Product, Engineering, and Marketing. Our developer strategy needs to work harmoniously with our product strategy and with our product marketing. It also utilizes resources from many other teams. Web development is done externally to the team. We have access to Confluent's training team to help with curriculum development for parts of dev.confluent.io. As a broader function, the Office of the CTO is involved in competitive analysis, thought leadership, mid-term product roadmap, and acquisitions, and you'll be expected to contribute to those as necessary
• Help the community grow, ensuring that the community team has the technical resources they need. For example, help vetting conference submissions (Kafka Summit and others) and optimizing time and travel commitments.
• Liaise with our content operations team to build innovative and thought-leading web assets that serve the Apache Kafka and Confluent developer communities
• Liaise with the product team to ensure that feedback from the developer community influences the product
• Work with our engineering team to build and deliver new content for developers across different media: conference talks, blogs, web content, video, etc.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of experience successfully leading engineering, developer relations, or technical product teams
• Proven management and project execution skills. You should be able to evidence implementing complex projects, handling diverse personalities, executing efficiently, and maximizing the value from resources you have at your disposal
• A deep technical background with an understanding of what makes developers tick, what gets them excited, what turns them off, and what good advocacy, thought leadership, written and verbal content looks like from the outside and feels like to the audience
• The ability to think strategically, know what needs to be done to achieve a goal, even when there is no pre-planned script or market leader to follow. We put this last not because it's less important, but because it's so dependent on the experience gained by the previous two.
• What does success look like, and how will you be measured?
• You will document and present a clear and innovative strategy for success, to be updated quarterly, and be measured against your progress towards its completion
• The Confluent Developer website is the team's primary online asset. Its viewership and cloud conversions are carefully monitored, and the growth of both of these numbers will be one of your primary proof points
• The quality of the content production is the other key metric for the team's output. While more subjective, content from this team should surprise and captivate. For the audience at the start of their learning journey, this means crisp explanations that ooze polish and style. Those further down expect gravitas, innovation wrapped as a clear lead for them to follow. You will be measured on the team's ability to go beyond the status quo
• Finally, your ability to hire and retain the high-impact team members that help the team achieve these goals is the most important single element of your own success here

Come As You Are

At Confluent, equality is a core tenet of our culture. We are committed to building an inclusive global team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and experiences. The more diverse we are, the richer our community and the broader our impact.

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