Head of Developer Experience

About the company

Convex is a reactive backend platform that provides an integrated TypeScript-first backend including a database, functions, workflow, sync, search, and file storage with ACID transactions and realtime subscriptions.

About this role

Application demands are rapidly changing while the experience to design and operate infrastructure is rapidly diminishing. A new platform abstraction is needed to support agentic development, agentic applications, and an entirely new set of application workloads. We think Convex is the team and platform best placed to define this abstraction. Convex works differently from the tools people are used to. The right way to build with it isn't always obvious, and increasingly the developer learning it is an agent rather than a person. Helping people and their agents make sense of something this new is still the domain of very talented humans, and we want you to be one of them. The Team: https://convex.dev/about-us Convex has assembled a team of engineers who have built and designed some of the largest platforms in the world, with exabytes of data, millions of transactions per second, and shipped desktop and mobile software onto billions of devices. We are a group of friendly, collaborative, and passionate people who love working in-person together in our office in San Francisco. We hire primarily in SF but have a few experienced folks working remotely in certain situations. The Role: We're looking for a Head of Developer Experience to own how developers and agents become great at building on Convex. You'll set the strategy, hold the point of view, and lead the team behind it. The docs, the writing, the developer narrative, and the advocacy your team takes to the community all flow from one thing: a real understanding of the product and a clear opinion on how people should build on it. Some weeks you'll go deep with the engineering team on something we just shipped and turn it into docs a developer, or the agent writing their code, can pick up easily. Other weeks you'll step back to decide what story we're telling developers this quarter, where the docs are falling short, and what your team should focus on next. The best person for this is someone who's genuinely excited to move between all of it. What You'll Do: - Set the strategy and point of view for how developers and agents learn to be successful on Convex. - Lead and grow the developer experience team, and build out documentation as a function over time. - Own the Convex docs https://docs.convex.dev/home and the information architecture behind them, ensuring that Convex stays legible from a developer's first day to their most expert work, for humans and agents alike. - Craft the writing and developer narrative that shape how people understand Convex, from our blog stack.convex.dev to the way we explain what we ship. - Work closely with engineering and the founders to turn what we build into things people can learn from. What Excites Us: - You've written developer docs or technical content that real developers relied on, and you have the work to show for it. - You've led a team before, ideally one doing developer-facing or content work, and know how to grow people and help them do their best work. - You can code, or read it closely enough to keep every example honest. - Genuine interest in how AI is changing the way software gets built, and a point of view on what developers and their agents need. - Interest in working in-person at Convex's office in SF. IDEAL CHARACTERISTICS This is an attempt to outline some characteristics of people who tend to thrive at Convex. We have a high demand for deep thinking and clear communication, while also having the typical demands of a small startup. CAN THEY ACTUALLY WRITE? Writing is the heart of this job. We're not looking for someone who can produce serviceable copy, but someone who can take something complicated and make it clear, with a structure that scans and a point of view that sticks. It's the rarest thing we're looking for and the hardest to fake. DO THEY HAVE A POINT OF VIEW? The best developer content and the best developer experience both come from someone who has a clear idea of what good looks like and pushes for it. We want someone who can look at how developers build on Convex today, form a strong opinion about how they should, and then build the docs, the writing, and the team to make that real. CAN THEY GO DEEP TECHNICALLY? You don't have to be the strongest engineer in the room, but you do have to engage seriously with the technical material and earn the team's trust. Convex is genuinely deep, and hand-waving doesn't survive contact with a skeptical developer. It shouldn't survive contact with you first. CAN THEY BUILD AND LEAD A TEAM? This is a leadership role, so a big part of the job is getting great work out of other people, not just producing it yourself. That means hiring well, giving people real ownership, developing their judgment, and caring more about what the team ships than what you could have written on your own. The best leaders we've worked with are the ones who make everyone around them better. DO THEY VALUE SIMPLICITY AND PRAGMATISM? We have a bias toward doing fewer things better. A lot of this job is telling what actually matters apart from what's merely nice to have, pointing the team at the former, and shipping it rather than polishing forever. It's a startup, and knowing what to leave undone matters as much as knowing what to build. DO THEY BRING ENERGY TO THE ROOM? Startups are hard. Building something from nothing is hard. Driving forward progress despite uncertainty is hard. Shitting on stuff is easy and just brings everyone else down. We have a high bar for quality but also a high bar for being constructive, positive, and excited about making things better. We're meant to be having fun here.