Founding Developer Relations Engineer
Goaly · Palo Alto, CA, USA ·
- Work mode
- Onsite
- Employment
- Full time
- Category
- Developer relations
- Experience
- 1+ years
- Visa sponsorship
- Yes
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Goaly, a stealth AI startup, is hiring its first Developer Relations Engineer in Palo Alto as its founding technical public voice: half building benchmarks, docs, and open-source tooling around LLM post-training on GPU clusters, half growing distribution through content, talks, and community. Requires real ML/infra engineering credibility plus a demonstrable audience.
We're building toward a world where every company can become its own AI lab.
Goaly is an early-stage AI startup founded by ex-Meta Superintelligence Labs engineers and researchers. Our founders built the Llama Research Platform that every Llama post-training run landed on, and led post-training efficiency on Meta's Superintelligence team. Our mission is to dramatically lower the cost, time, and talent barriers to building proprietary AI — and make each generation of models faster and cheaper to build than the last.
Goaly is the autonomous performance layer for AI training. It watches every job across a GPU fleet, catches the runs that are wasting compute, reallocates what it frees up, and shows teams what each model improvement actually costs. It runs on-prem, telemetry-only, and starts read-only.
Backed by leading AI investors and endorsed by frontier AI researchers and builders, we're looking for an engineer who loves developers, knows how to bring them together, and brings what they say back into the product.
You will be our 1st Developer Relations hire, working closely with the founding team, and you will own three things:
Build the Goaly developer community. The AI teams who build on and around Goaly, online and in person, from the first hundred to the first ten thousand.
Host the events where that community meets. AI Hackathons, workshops, meetups, office hours, technical deep dives / podcasts, and conference presence.
Collect product feedback and get it acted on. Through Discord and Slack, GitHub, social, and face-to-face conversations, then into engineering with enough precision that it changes the roadmap.
You need an engineering background, because you will build demos, write quickstarts, and answer real technical questions in public. You need a customer-first product mindset, because the job is to make developers successful first and Goaly successful as a result. You do not need a background in model training.
Bonus: If you have shipped AI applications or worked as a forward-deployed engineer (FDE), that is a big bonus.
This is a founding role. You will work with the founding team closely. There is no playbook yet; you help write it, and you will have real influence over how Goaly is perceived and adopted by the AI developer community.
Build the AI developer community
Stand up and run Goaly's developer community: Discord or Slack groups, and the social channels where our users already are (X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, Reddit).
Be present every day: answer questions, welcome newcomers, triage issues, gather product feedback, and surface what people are building.
Identify and amplify community contributions, success stories, and creative uses of Goaly.
Build relationships with influential developers & AI researchers, open-source maintainers, and technical educators in the AI space, and bring them in as early members and collaborators.
Host events
Plan and run Goaly's event program end to end: hackathons, hands-on workshops, Bay Area meetups, office hours, and live coding sessions. You own agenda, speakers, logistics, on-site execution, and follow-up.
Represent Goaly at conferences, hackathons, and university recruiting events. Land talks at the venues our users attend (PyTorch Conference, MLSys, Ray Summit, GTC, AI Engineer events, NeurIPS and ICML workshops).
Turn each event into community growth, product feedback, and pipeline, and track which formats actually work.
Collect and route product feedback
Gather feedback from online channels and from in-person conversations with users, design partners, and prospects, and synthesize it into clear, prioritized insight for engineering and product.
Reproduce the problems developers hit, bring precise reports back to engineering, and close the loop with the community on what shipped.
Join design-partner and prospect calls with the GTM team when a technical voice closes the gap, and turn repeated questions into docs, demos, or product changes.
Build and explain
Build demo applications, sample integrations, and reference setups that show what is possible on Goaly, and keep them working as the product evolves.
Write the quickstarts, tutorials, and cookbooks that get a developer from zero to a first result in thirty minutes.
Partner with engineering to turn every new capability into accessible content the week it ships: posts, short videos, live walkthroughs.
Turn the founding team's experience into talks and posts that the community wants to share.
Own the community growth
Track community growth and engagement, event attendance and follow-through, docs funnel, feedback items shipped, inbound design-partner requests, and candidates sourced. Double down on what works and kill what doesn't.
WHAT A TYPICAL WEEK LOOKS LIKE
A day and a half in the community: Discord and GitHub, DMs with developers, welcoming and unblocking people, writing up what they said.
A day building: a demo app, a sample integration, a quickstart that broke, reproducing a bug a user reported.
A day on events: planning the next workshop or hackathon, lining up speakers, prepping a talk, or running the event itself.
Half a day writing or recording: a post, a tutorial, a short video.
A day with the team: engineering sync on feedback and what shipped, GTM sync on what prospects asked, founder time on narrative.
Roughly 10% travel over the year for conferences, hackathons, and customer visits.
An engineering background: 1-3 years as a software engineer and 1+ year AI-native coding experiences. You can build a working demo quickly, read someone else's stack trace, and answer a technical question in public without checking with anyone first.
Experience building applications with LLMs or AI tooling. You have shipped something real on top of a model API or an AI framework and debugged it when it broke.
A customer-first product mindset: ability to listen to frustrated engineers, measure success by developer outcome, and translate technical feedback into product improvements.
Community building experiences: reach you can point to: a community you built or grew, events you organized, an audience on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, a newsletter, or GitHub, or a demonstrable history of building reach from zero. Reach inside the AI developer community matters far more than raw follower count.
Solid Written & Oral Comm. A track record of explaining technical things clearly in public: posts, docs, talks, tutorials, or videos. Send links; we will read them.
Self-starter & fast-learner who identifies what is missing and drives it without waiting to be asked.
Big bonus: 1-3yrs of AI application / solution engineer or forward-deployed engineer (FDE) experience. You have taken a customer from a blank page to a result on an AI product, not just watched them try.
Prior developer relations, developer advocate, or community building experience at an AI / MLOps companies, SaaS etc
Experience organizing hackathons, workshops, or meetups, and running a developer Discord or Slack.
Active presence in developer communities such as GitHub, X, Discord, or Reddit, and existing relationships with AI engineers, researchers, or open-source maintainers.
Fluency on video and on stage; comfortable on a podcast or a conference keynote.
Familiarity with ML/AI training workflows or AI stacks (PyTorch, Ray, Kubernetes, W&B etc). Helpful, not required.
You spend most of your time with engineers building on the most compute-intensive workloads in the industry, and you learn what actually breaks.
The community you build becomes the way the industry learns about a new category.
Your feedback goes straight into the roadmap, with no layers between you and the founders who built post-training infra at Llama scale.
You own a function from 0 to 1 to 10, with a clear path to leading it as it grows.
Great vibe: strong (and fun) team who worked in the frontier before, substantial GPU capacity to test ideas, and real customers to build with.
You want to build the core product, not grow the community around it and feed it what the community says.
You would rather manage an agency or a content calendar than run the hackathon and write the tutorial yourself.
You don't like talking to strangers at meetups, or flying to conferences.
You want a playbook. There isn't one yet.
Hybrid in Palo Alto: 4+ days/week in office.
Visa sponsorship: H-1B and OPT/CPT support available, with immigration counsel.
Meals & perks: Complimentary lunch, dinner, snacks, and drinks.
A note on qualifications. We value exceptional ability over perfect keyword matches. If the work excites you and you can show strong technical ability, learning speed, or ownership, we encourage you to apply.
Send us 3 links to start: something you built, something you wrote or presented, and a community or event you ran or grew. If you don't have one of the three, tell us in a paragraph what you would do in your first 90 days to get a thousand AI engineers building with Goaly.
A note on qualifications. We value exceptional ability over perfect keyword matches. If the work excites you and you can show strong technical ability, genuine care for developers, and real reach, we encourage you to apply.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates who need them during the hiring process.
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