Warm Intros for DevRel and Community Roles
Cold-applying to DevRel and community roles buries you under people who list the same conference talks. The honest fix: talk to the person already running community there, because they screen these hires.
Find your warm intro →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
Why the community lead is the right first contact
For most roles you route around the hiring manager. For DevRel and community, the person already running community IS the hiring manager, or the one whose opinion decides it. They feel the pain the new hire is supposed to fix, so they read your message as a preview of how you would show up in their Discord or at their booth.
A referral from that person carries more weight than any recruiter contact, because they can vouch for taste, not just resume keywords. Reaching them first also tells you whether the role is real, growing, or quietly frozen, which the job post never says.
How to reach the community owner so they actually reply
Community people get pitched constantly, so a generic note reads as noise. Give them a reason rooted in something shared and something specific to their work.
- Lead with the overlap, not the ask. Open on the concrete thing you share (same alma mater, a former employer, a meetup you both spoke at) so you are a warm name in the first line, not a stranger asking for a job.
- Name one real thing they built. Reference their actual docs revamp, ambassador program, or a thread they ran, and say what you noticed. It proves you did the work and did not mass-blast twelve companies.
- Ask for a chat, not a referral. Request 15 minutes to hear how they think about community at the company. The referral, if it comes, comes after they like you, never before.
- Make helping you cost 30 seconds. Offer two time windows and a single clear question so a busy person can say yes without doing any planning work.
Finding the right person without guessing (where FindWarmIntros fits)
The hard part is not the message, it is knowing who currently owns community and which of them you actually have a real thread to. Titles are messy: the person running the Discord might be called Developer Advocate, Community Manager, or Ecosystem Lead, and org charts are rarely public.
This is the finding-and-ranking part FindWarmIntros does for you. You name the target company, and it surfaces the real people there you share a school or past employer with, ranks who is closest to community work, and drafts an intro that leads with what you share. You still send it and you still do the reading, but you skip the hours of guessing at who to even contact.
If you would rather do it by hand, search the company on LinkedIn for community and developer titles, cross-check who posts in their forums, and look for any overlap in your own history before you write.