Senior Developer Advocate, AI

About the Job: LaunchDarkly is looking for a Senior Developer Advocate based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The developer community is deciding right now what the AI era of software looks like, and much of that conversation happens in person: meetups, demo nights, hackathons, and hallway conversations across the city. You'll own our Bay Area presence: which rooms we're in, how often we're there, and what we do with what we learn. That means being in those rooms consistently, as a genuine participant: building long-term relationships with the practitioners shaping how agentic software gets built, bringing their signal back to LaunchDarkly, and showing them, credibly and only when it's relevant, how runtime control changes what they can ship. It's a role for someone who would be going to these events anyway. Responsibilities: • Show up consistently : attend Bay Area developer events several times a week (meetups, demo nights, hackathons, conferences), building real relationships with AI and platform engineers over months, not transactions over days • Listen more than you talk : bring back structured signal on what practitioners are building, where they're stuck, and how they talk about agents, releases, and runtime control • Demonstrate, don't pitch : build and show small, credible demos on AgentControl and the LaunchDarkly platform, and hold your own when the technical questions get hard • Add to the conversation : write event recaps and practitioner-grade content that people in the community actually want to read, rather than broadcasting at them • Earn the right to convene : over time, organize gatherings around problems developers actually have, not around LaunchDarkly as a brand • Feed the team : route relationships, signal, and opportunities to the owners who can act on them, with enough context attached to act What Success Looks Like: • LaunchDarkly has a consistent, welcome presence in the rooms where the AI developer conversation is happening, and you decided which rooms those are • Organizers invite you to speak rather than fielding our pitches, and practitioners seek you out at events • Your recaps get shared by people who weren't in the room, and your content draws an audience without paid distribution • What you bring back changes decisions: a play gets adjusted, positioning gets sharpened, a docs gap gets prioritized because of what you surfaced • You've killed or redesigned at least one part of your own plan based on the evidence, and told us afterward • Over time, you're convening gatherings developers attend for the problems on the agenda, and increasingly because you're the host Qualifications: • Experience in developer advocacy, community, solutions engineering, customer success, or another customer-facing technical role • Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the ability to attend events in person several times a week, including evenings • Technically credible: you can build and demo real things and hold a deep technical conversation without a script • Already active in, or genuinely drawn to, the AI developer scene • A strong written voice: your recaps make people who weren't in the room feel like they missed something Bonus if you have: • An existing network in the Bay Area developer community • Experience organizing meetups or developer events • Familiarity with feature management, experimentation, observability, or agent frameworks Pay: Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 4: • Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $ 152,000 - $210,000 ** • Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $ 137,000 - $189,000 ** • Zone 3: All other US locations - $ 129,000 - $178,000 ** L