Title:  Sr. Developer Advocate - AI and Open Source

Job Summary

Instaclustr is looking for a Senior Developer Advocate to join our team to focus on the intersection of AI and our open source technologies. You should be an AI technical expert who creates content that is easy for customers and the community to consume and use. To be effective in this role, you must have a passion for creating technical content that educates, inspires, and empowers developers.  

As part of NetApp, Instaclustr empowers companies to run powerful open-source technologies like Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and OpenSearch—at scale and with confidence. Our platform handles everything from provisioning to production reliability, so our customers can focus on building great applications. By leveraging our proven platform-based delivery, open source innovation, and NetApp storage, we’re uniquely positioned to lead in hyperscaler-agnostic application data infrastructure for agentic AI.

As a Senior Developer Advocate, you will be the bridge between the AI developer community and our product organization. You will use your deep understanding of AI technologies, open source data platforms, and agentic AI architectures to champion Instaclustr's managed services (Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, Cadence, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and OpenSearch) as essential infrastructure for modern AI applications. Your work will directly support the product management team's AI market segment strategy by creating compelling technical narratives, validating use cases through hands-on demonstrations, and gathering critical feedback from the developer community. 

You will author compelling developer content—demos, code samples, blogs, and vlogs—that showcases how AI initiatives can be powered by open source technologies managed by NetApp. Through presentations at industry events and engagement across developer channels, you’ll demonstrate how to integrate these technologies effectively. Your work will build trust in NetApp Instaclustr as the best place to run data infrastructure for AI, removing barriers to execution and helping developers, customers, and partners maximize impact. You’ll also serve as a bridge between the community and product teams, sharing insights to improve the overall experience. 

Job Responsibilities

Developer Community Engagement & Advocacy 

• Build and nurture relationships with AI developers, ML engineers, and architects working on agentic AI applications and data-intensive AI workloads 
• Serve as the voice of AI developers within Instaclustr, providing product management with continuous feedback on developer needs, pain points, and emerging use cases
• Engage with open source AI communities around key technologies including Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Cadence, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and ClickHouse at industry conferences, meetups, webinars, and online communities 

Technical Content Creation & Evangelism 

• Develop high-quality technical content (tutorials, demos, code samples, blog posts, videos) that demonstrates how to build AI applications using Instaclustr's managed platform, in close collaboration with our Sr. Product Manager to translate product vision and market narratives into content that resonates with developers. 
• Create reference architectures and solution patterns for common agentic AI use cases (RAG pipelines, vector search, real-time AI inference, AI data pipelines) 
• Produce compelling demonstrations that showcase the integration of Instaclustr portfolio with popular AI tools and frameworks 

Responsibilities continued

Product-Aligned Developer Experience 

• Work closely with the Sr. Product Manager – AI Market Segment to ensure developer advocacy efforts align with segment strategy and business goals 
• Validate product hypotheses through hands-on prototyping and developer feedback, supporting the PM's customer discovery and experimentation efforts
• Contribute to the "working backwards" product development process by articulating developer perspectives and technical requirements

Technical Leadership & Expertise

• Serve as a subject matter expert on AI infrastructure requirements, including data pipelines, vector databases, streaming platforms, and operational data stores for AI applications
• Stay current with emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and architectural patterns, providing insights to product and engineering teams
• Troubleshoot technical challenges faced by developers using Instaclustr for AI workloads and escalate product gaps or opportunities to product management
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve developer experience, API design, and integration patterns 

Required Experience & Education

• Production experience with AI technologies and frameworks (eg LangChain/LangGraph), vector databases and embeddings 
• Hands-on experience building agentic AI applications, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, or LLM-powered applications
• Understanding and experience with AI data pipelines and MLOps practices
• Knowledge of streaming architectures and event-driven systems for AI applications
• Strong experience with open source data platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Cadence, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, or similar technologies
• Excellent written, verbal, and video communication skills with a portfolio of technical content (blogs, talks, tutorials, open source contributions)
• Active participation in open source communities with visible contributions (GitHub profile, conference talks, blog posts)
• Background in developer relations, developer advocacy, technical evangelism, solution architecture, or software engineering
• Ability to work cross-functionally with product management, engineering, and go-to-market teams with limited supervision
• Willingness to travel 20-30% of the time for conferences, conventions, customer meetings, and partner engagements
• Bachelor's degree in a technical/engineering field; or additional required experience in place of education requirement 

Successful Metrics

Success in the Role:  Success in this role at 6 months will be measured by the publication of impactful technical content (e.g., 3+ tutorials, demos, or reference architectures), delivery of 2+ presentations at industry events, and the establishment of a strong presence in AI developer communities. The role also requires building trusted relationships across cross-functional teams, informing the product roadmap with strategic insights on AI trends, tailoring content to diverse audiences, and exercising sound judgment in addressing technical challenges and developer needs.