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Head of Developer Relations

About Lightpanda

We're building something that shouldn't exist. A headless browser built from scratch, designed specifically for machines and AI.

We've thrown out the legacy approach of retrofitting desktop browsers for automation because Headless Chrome wasn't built for what's coming next.

The future of web traffic isn't humans clicking through pages. It’s AI agents taking actions on behalf of humans, LLM training pipelines, and automated workflows operating at massive scale.

We know this firsthand. Our founding team spent years crawling millions of web pages per day at our previous company, wrestling with the pain of building on top of Chrome's bloated memory footprint and sluggish performance. So we started over.

Lightpanda is written in Zig, a systems programming language optimized for performance. Our browser starts up instantly, is 10x faster than Chrome headless and uses 10x less RAM. We're open source, compatible with Puppeteer and Playwright, and backed by leading investors including the founders of Mistral, Hugging Face, and Dust.

We recently closed our pre-seed round and we're ready to grow. But growth for an open source project isn't about traditional marketing. It's about winning the hearts and minds of developers who care about performance, efficiency, and doing more with less.

The Role

We're hiring a Head of Developer Relations to be our champion in the developer community, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This isn't a role where you'll bounce from conference to conference delivering the same canned pitch. We need someone who genuinely understands what we're building and can speak authentically about why it matters.

You'll be our presence on the ground, attending meetups, running demos at hackathons, spending time building relationships with developers who are pushing the boundaries of web automation and AI from YC companies to fast-growing AI scaleups and large enterprises.

You'll help developers get unstuck, gather feedback from real users, and bring that intelligence back to our product and engineering teams.

This role is crucial because you'll be shaping how the developer community perceives and adopts Lightpanda during our critical early growth phase. The relationships you build and the feedback you gather will directly influence our product roadmap and market positioning.

What You'll Do

You'll wear multiple hats in this role. Your work will span community engagement, content creation, technical support, and strategic feedback loops with our team.

Community & Events

  • Show up to meetups, hackathons, and developer events across the Bay Area and beyond
  • Demo Lightpanda in person and help developers troubleshoot during events
  • Build relationships with developers at YC companies, AI scaleups, and large enterprises
  • Be the face of Lightpanda in the broader developer community

Technical Content & Documentation

  • Contribute to and improve our documentation based on real user feedback
  • Create technical content that helps developers solve problems with Lightpanda
  • Write guides, tutorials, and example code that showcases what's possible
  • Help developers understand how to migrate from Headless Chrome to Lightpanda

Product Feedback & Advocacy

  • Act as the bridge between our community and our engineering team
  • Surface bugs, feature requests, and usability issues from developers in the field
  • Understand the competitive landscape and what developers need from a headless browser
  • Help shape our product roadmap based on real-world developer pain points

Requirements

We're looking for someone who can code, communicate, and connect with developers authentically. This includes:

Technical Capabilities

  • Can build web crawlers using tools like Puppeteer or Playwright
  • Comfortable reading and writing JavaScript/TypeScript for automation scripts
  • Understanding of web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM manipulation)
  • Able to debug issues and help developers troubleshoot problems during hackathons
  • Can evaluate and explain technical trade-offs in a way developers respect

Communication & Presence

  • Excellent public speaking skills and comfortable demoing in front of audiences
  • Strong technical writing ability for documentation and tutorials
  • Natural conversationalist who can build rapport with developers in person
  • Charismatic and approachable, not salesy or corporate
  • Can translate complex technical concepts into clear, practical guidance

Community & Relationship Building

  • Genuinely passionate about developer tools and the problems they solve
  • Comfortable showing up to events and striking up conversations with strangers
  • Patient and helpful when developers are stuck or frustrated
  • Able to gather feedback diplomatically and surface it constructively
  • Network-oriented mindset: you see every conversation as a potential relationship

Work Style

  • Self-directed and able to manage multiple priorities without constant oversight
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and figuring things out as you go
  • Willing to get your hands dirty, this isn't a pure strategy role
  • Based in (or willing to relocate to) the San Francisco Bay Area
  • Excited about the mission of building better infrastructure for AI and automation

Experience

Required

  • 3+ years of hands-on experience in developer relations, developer advocacy, or technical community roles
  • Proven track record of engaging with technical communities (meetups, conferences, online forums)
  • Experience creating technical content (blog posts, documentation, tutorials, talks)
  • Background working with automation tools or infrastructure products
  • Demonstrated ability to build relationships with developers and technical decision-makers

Preferred

  • Experience with open source projects and understanding of open source community dynamics
  • Prior hands-on development experience, particularly with web crawling or automation
  • Knowledge of AI/LLM workflows and how developers are building agentic systems
  • Existing network in the Bay Area developer community
  • Experience working at an early-stage startup where you wore multiple hats

Not Required

  • College degree (we care about what you can do, not where you studied)
  • Experience at a large tech company
  • Marketing or sales background

Why This Is an Exciting Opportunity

We're at an inflection point. AI is fundamentally changing how software interacts with the web, and we're building the foundational layer that makes it possible.

This isn't a role where you'll be constrained by corporate bureaucracy or asked to push products you don't believe in. You'll have the freedom to build relationships authentically, contribute to our open source project, and shape how developers think about web automation.

You'll work closely with our founding team and have a direct line to product and engineering decisions. Your feedback will matter. The relationships you build will directly impact our growth.

We're looking for someone who wants to be here for the long haul. This is about building something meaningful, not just collecting another line on your resume. If you're the right person, this role comes with significant equity upside.

The web wasn't built for AI. We're fixing that. If that excites you and you’d like the chance to play a key part in how machines interact with the web, we'd love to hear from you.