Sr. Manager of Developer Relations Engineering

Join Vonage and help us innovate cloud communications for businesses worldwide!

Why this role matters:

We are seeking an experienced leader to build and guide our Developer Relations Engineering team. This is a critical role in the Vonage responsible for setting the vision and strategy for how we engage, empower, and champion the developer community. You will lead a high-performing team of hybrid engineer-advocates who build the practical solutions, robust tools, and inspiring content that make our products tangible and accessible to developers worldwide. As a player-coach, you will not only manage the team but also serve as a key voice for the developer community within the company, ensuring their needs and feedback directly influence our product roadmap. If you are a technical leader with a passion for building developer communities and creating impactful solutions, this is the role for you.

Your key responsibilities:

• Lead and Inspire: Recruit, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of Developer Relation Engineers, fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative culture.
• Define the Strategy: Develop and own the team's strategy and roadmap, defining the key initiatives that will improve the developer journey, from initial onboarding to advanced application development.
• Drive Technical Excellence: Oversee the design and development of high-impact technical artifacts, including large-scale demos, public-facing tools (CLIs, SDKs), and reference architectures that showcase the power and versatility of our products.
• Champion Content and Community: Guide the team in transforming their engineering work into compelling technical content, such as in-depth tutorials, blog posts, and conference presentations, to educate and grow our developer community.
• Be the Developer's Advocate: Act as an important bridge between the external developer community and our internal Product and Engineering teams. Systematically gather, synthesize, and relay developer feedback to drive meaningful product improvements.
• Build for AI-Assisted Development: Create a seamless developer experience for AI-assisted coding, model integration, agentic AI workflows, and intelligent automation, with best practices, examples, and documentation that enable developers to use AI effectively.
• Prioritize for Impact: Manage the team's backlog and prioritize projects using a data-informed framework to ensure we are always focused on the most valuable initiatives for the developer community and the business.
• Measure Success: Define, track, and report on the team's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), demonstrating the impact of our developer engagement efforts.
• Collaborate Across Functions: Build strong partnerships with leaders in Product, Engineering, and Marketing, as well as the other Developer Relations leaders to ensure a cohesive and world-class developer experience.

What you’ll bring:

Required:

• Strong software engineering background and have built and shipped production-grade applications.
• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, SDKs, or other productivity-enhancing automations.
• A history of creating high-impact technical content (blogs, videos) and speaking at developer conferences or meetups.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Working knowledge in two or more languages, such as NodeJS, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, or .NET
• Proven experience in a leadership role, managing and scaling technical teams focused on developer experience, developer relations, or platform engineering.
• Deep understanding of developer communities and a passion for engaging with developers, understanding their pain points, and advocating for their needs.

What we consider a plus:

• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Thinking strategically to set a long-term vision while also managing day-to-day execution and prioritizing tasks effectively to align with company goals.
• Leading with empathy and using data to inform your decisions, from prioritizing projects to measuring team impact.

Where you will work:

This position offers a remote work arrangement based in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States. Occasional travel domestically and internationally up to 20% of the time is required. 

Sponsorship is not available. Legal authorization to work in the USA is required. We are unable to sponsor individuals for employment visas, now o