As we continue to rapidly grow at Xamarin, we’ve reached a point where we are looking to spread the word about MonoTouch and Mono for Android to even more developers around the world. To do this we’re creating a new team of social coders to represent us to the community as Developer Evangelists.
What is a Developer Evangelist? The job of an evangelist (sometimes called a Developer Advocate) is to raise awareness for our products in developer communities online and off. This means doing things like speaking at events, creating blog posts and screencasts, answering questions on Stack Overflow or anything else that helps our customers be successful.
Maybe you’ve never considered being an Evangelist because it’s “too sales-y” or “not technical enough”. At Xamarin, that’s not the case. The Evangelist’s job is to build relationships with developers and be a technical ally to our customers. That means you can get your hands as dirty as you want and you can leave the selling up to our excellent sales team.
Here are a few other reasons why you should consider it:
Work with Some of the Best Engineers in the World
We’ve taken great care to hire the best talent we can find. They’ve created a set of tools that are enabling developers all over the world to build great apps. The biggest injustice to a product is for the customer that needs it to never know it exists. Your job is to bring our engineer’s hard work out into the world and get it into the right hands. And when those customers need someone to advocate for them on the inside, you represent them back to the company.
Mobile is the Future Present
The mobile industry is relatively young, but it’s clearly the direction the computing world is heading. Xamarin is situated right in the heart of the mobile movement and committed to making the best cross-platform mobile development tools in the industry.
Satisfaction From Enabling Others
Much of the work you’ll be doing is helping customers be more successful at whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. You’ll help startups build the prototypes that help them get funded. You’ll help giant companies save millions of dollars. You’ll help developers learn new skills that help them get a better job. I can’t overstate how satisfying is to watch someone you helped become successful, but I’ll try anyway. It’s infinitely satisfying. And you’ll be doing it every day.
Autonomy and Variety of Work
We’re growing fast, so we have a lot of work to do, and evangelists will always have way more work than they could reasonably finish. It’s up to them to decide what exactly they should be working on at any time.
In order to be autonomous you need to be good at doing a lot of different things. If the most important thing you could be doing right now is writing a blog post, you need to be a good writer. If it’s writing a utility or helping a customer with a prototype, you better be a good coder. Evangelists tend to be a combination of engineer, support, marketing, sales, business development, and product. Having the ability to shift roles quickly goes a long way to satisfying all of those needs. If you thrive on constantly taking on different kinds of problems, you’ll find a lot of satisfaction in finishing all of the different kinds of tasks presented to you.
If you’re good at just a few of those things, the time constraints of the job will likely force you to get stronger in your weak areas very quickly. Having a wide variety of work can also help you get over hurdles (like writer’s block) by letting you shift modes for a little while. After some time in the role you’re almost guaranteed to be a much more well-rounded overall employee.
Travel the World (or Not)
You’re probably thinking one of two things: “I love seeing new places, that sounds cool” or “traveling is the WORST”. Good news, traveling gets better the more you do it (the airlines treat you a lot better if you fly a lot) but if that’s still not your thing, we’re also hiring evangelists to focus their efforts on online communities and activities. If you do like to travel, you’ll rack up a ton of frequent flyer miles that are yours to keep and you’ll get to spend time at all the conferences you’ve always wanted to attend.
Are you ready?
If this sounds exciting to you, we want to hear from you! We’re looking for multiple evangelists based in San Francisco, CA or Cambridge, MA with relocation assistance available if you’re willing to move. We’ll also consider remote employees if you’re located in a major metropolitan area and don’t mind traveling to the office occasionally. We have competitive salary and benefits. We’re growing fast and are cash-flow positive.
So once you have Android running on Mono, the obvious question is — how does Mono perform compared to Dalvik?
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