Developer Relations, Education

Are you the rare developer, software creator, or engineer who not only dreams about solving bugs and shipping new features but loves writing, speaking, and teaching other developers what you’ve learned? Do you fantasize about taking a meaningful role in shaping platform specific developer workflows through creative approaches to tools and experiences? Are you a master implementor?

As a developer evangelist at NEAR, your mission is to educate and engage early adopters and the broader developer community about our platform. One way you’ll do this is by telling a compelling story with practical examples, similar to how a cartoon artist creates a graphic novel. That means being creative and sometimes, doing whatever it takes to prove to developers that our community and that products produced through that community have a real impact and value. 

Once developers join us, your job will be to build relationships and learn from those relationships via their experiences so that you can help keep each developer active and happily building. What you find through your relationships will be shared with our core team to constantly improve on what we are building. In other words, you are a champion for our community of developers internally.

Education is crucial to the long term adoption of any new platform. The developer advocate we are looking for here specializes in education. Meaning not only do you enjoy teaching but further, you are constantly striving for the feeling you get when one of your student’s eyes lights up with understanding.

Frankly speaking, you’ll be wearing many hats. As NEAR’s core protocol is developed, you will be a key interface with the early community of adopters that are so crucial to our current and future success. You’ll need to build developer tools (often from scratch), write and present demos, tutorials, and practical examples of common and often novel implementations. 

You will be a visible presence representing NEAR in communities around the world by working directly with our events and community teams. You’ll be speaking, hosting workshops, supporting developers at events, and much more. What you learn from our community of developers will be what NEAR’s North Star is in shaping the development and education roadmaps of our future. 

This is a role that will allow you to build real software, yes. But it is also a role where you will be very visible. You’ll act as a soothsayer between our community of developers and our team of core contributors with your weapon of choice being documentation and developer education.  In other words, this role is one part engineering, one part community, and one part education with a sprinkle of marketing, PR, and a cherry on top.

Key Outcomes

• Build demos, SDKs, and implementations to help bring early customers onto the platform
• Work with the team to produce technical tools and educational materials necessary to create an amazing developer experience
• Represent NEAR as a technical voice at major events and conferences, including speaking and supporting platform development

Key Requirements

• 4+ years in software engineering at top companies
• 2+ years in evangelism, education or other public-facing technical roles
• Experience working with blockchain technologies (eg DApp development)
• A strong track record of speaking, presenting and teaching highly technical topics
• A clear passion for both creating software and engaging live communities

Please note: 

Samples of your technical work (the design, development, and deployment of non-trivial software) will be expected as part of your submission. Samples of your technical writing (articles, workshops, presentations) will be expected as part of your submission. These can be presented as open source projects, links to online artifacts, or verbally as part of your interview process.  The more concrete the examples, the better.

About NEAR and the NEAR Collective

NEAR's mission is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. The NEAR platform provides a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands.

The NEAR platform, NEAR Protocol, and associated tooling are being built by the NEAR Collective, a collection of the best engineers in the world who work across teams, companies and countries similar to other large scale open source projects. Core contributors include a couple of 2-time ICPC world champions, 2 gold medalists, a Latin American champion and multiple other competitive programming finalists.

Working at NEAR

Roles are posted to this portal on behalf of the companies that make up the NEAR Collective and are typically located anywhere in the world because most of the companies are fully remote. Some hubs are located in Switzerland, Germany, Russia, the US and China. Regardless of where you work, this is a high performance culture that values ownership, execution and professionalism but pairs it with curiosity and experimentation. The vision is big but the right team is behind it.