Why Are Startups Hiring Their First DevRel Engineers in 2026? Proven Strategy

TL;DR

• Developers are the growth engine of any early-stage B2B SaaS startups and getting a right DevRel can accelerate adoption and reduce churn.

• Hiring a DevRel in 2025 is expensive and slow (3–6 months + $120K–$180K salaries). It’s a big risk for startups still finding PMF.

• Few candidates have the ideal mix of coding skills, community engagement, and technical empathy, making unicorn hires rare.

• A team-based approach (fractional, agency, or hybrid) can deliver immediate impact with less cost and risk.

Developers are the growth engine of any software-driven business, especially for early-stage B2B SaaS companies whose products rely on developer adoption and advocacy. Building meaningful, long-term relationships with developers is not optional, but it is, in fact, a competitive advantage.

However, creating impact with DevRel isn’t about hiring someone with a technical background; it’s not that simple, as it requires clear strategies, well-defined goals, and the right people who can bridge the gap between product, community, and business outcomes. In this blog, we wil discuss what is devrel, why the position of devrel has become important and why early-staged B2B SaaS startups should hire them and our proven devrel strategy that worked.

Why Hire a DevRel Engineer for Your B2B SaaS Company?

You’ve probably faced this scenario:

Your team ships a product that solves a huge and common pain point. But the users struggle to get started, complain about documentation, or churn before seeing value. The users didn’t understand the intent of your developer’s product.

If you are considering whether to hire a Developer Relations engineer for your early-stage B2B SaaS company, let me share some insights that highlight why hiring a DevRel is a good idea.

There’s a gap between the users and developers and unfortunately, at times, users don’t understand the intent of the product. So, to bridge the gap between the product’s users and developers, DevRels is invited to build a relationship between the two parties.

A DevRel engineer builds a relationship between your developers and your users and translates your product’s value into code samples, tutorials, documentation, and real conversations.

Not sure about what roles and responsibilities you need to hire a DevRel for?

Well, the roles and responsibilities an ideal DevRel should have are technical storytelling, code-first advocacy, public speaking and content, community building, empathy for developers and metric-driven growth.

Yes, the process of recruiting an ideal candidate for your B2B SaaS Startup is going to be lengthy. If you no longer want to waste any more time, you may opt for another way. You may partner with DevRel service providers who specialize in the B2B market, like Infrasity.

Infrasity has a seasoned team of DevRels who are extremely customer-facing to showcase your product and fill the gap between your product users and developers. They are fast and, most importantly, cost-effective and result-driven.

How Can I Start Hiring a Developer Engineer? The Right Way to Approach

Hiring your first developer relations engineer for your early-stage B2B SaaS startup is not just about posting a job description and hoping for the best. You need to do more than that and make a strategic decision that impacts your product adoption, community growth, and developer experience.

Not sure how to do that? Read along the steps to find out:

1. Audit Your Current Developer Experience

Before you even think about hiring, evaluate your product’s current state from a developer’s perspective. You need to understand what role the DevRel is going to be hired for:

• Is it for brand awareness?
• Is it to understand the market pain points?
• Or is it to create better onboarding experiences that reduce churn?

Knowing this upfront ensures you hire with purpose and not just because it feels like the “next startup move.”

2. Pinpoint Your Product Stage

Responsibilities change from company to company and your company will have different demands, but for most early-stage B2B SaaS startups, you do not need a full-time DevRel yet. Instead, focus on:

• Early stage: Creating content loops, starter templates.

• Growth stage: Pair DevRel with scalable documentation, videos, and SEO. Infrasity has supported several early-stage B2B SaaS companies with these services.
• Mature stage: Community, advocacy, events, and feedback early and use it to guide product decisions

Example: For one of our customers, Devzero.io, we created starter templates because their customer needed quick wins, wrote integration documentation where none existed, produced hands-on video tutorials to help developers adopt features faster, updated outdated core docs that were written by devs but hard to follow, and fixed bugs in their docs and added new sections for features in development

This phased approach delivers impact fast without locking you into a costly full-time hire too early.

3. Cost of Hiring a DevRel

For most early-stage B2B SaaS startups, cost is the first (and often biggest) hurdle when considering a DevRel hire. The salary alone can feel like a major commitment, however, the real cost of hiring a DevRel engineer goes beyond just what you pay them every month.

In 2025, experienced Developer Relations engineers of 4-8 years in the U.S. typically command salaries between $120,000 and $180,000 per year. This can, sometimes, change from company to company and even higher if they have strong personal brands or a track record at well-known developer-first companies. This level of investment can be significant for early-stage founders who are still finding product-market fit and carefully managing burn rates, every single day.

BUT salary is just the starting point. Once you account for benefits, taxes, and equity grants, your total cost of employment can climb 20-30% higher. That means your first DevRel engineer hire could realistically cost your B2B SaaS startup close to $200,000 annually before they’ve even started producing measurable results.

There are a lot of hidden costs even after hiring. There’s there’s a ramp-up period where your new DevRel engineer will need to:

• Learn your product first, deeply enough to speak credibly about it
• Build relationships with internal stakeholders - product, engineering, marketing.
• Get familiar with existing documentation, code samples, and developer tools.

Now the main question in your mind must be, “is there a smarter approach?”

Yes! Yes there is. For many early-stage B2B SaaS startups, the alternative to hiring a full-time DevRel is to work with a team-based model that delivers DevRel outcomes without the overhead of a single expensive hire. At Infrasity, we’ve seen that founders who take this route get immediate momentum! For less than 1 FTE, you get a system that ships weekly content and videos.

• Weekly Content & Tutorials: A steady stream of blogs, sample apps, and integration guides that accelerate onboarding
• Continuous Video Output: Developer-friendly walkthroughs and demos that make adoption faster and reduce churn.
• Iterative Feedback Loops: Real developer feedback turned into actionable insights for product teams.

Another way to approach is hiring a freelancer for $20-$80 per hour, which will cost you up to $62,000 - $125,000 per year.

4. Skills to Look for in a Developer Relations

Hiring for developer relations can feel tricky because a DevRel role is part-engineer, part-marketer, and part-community-builder. For an early-stage B2B SaaS startup, you want someone who can move fast, communicate well, and still write real code.

Here are the 3 core skills that you must look for when hiring DevRel:

• Developer skills: A DevRel engineer should be able to build small sample apps, write and test integration code, and contribute to docs or SDKs.Without this technical foundation, they’ll struggle to speak credibly to your developer audience and you risk creating content that sounds like marketing fluff rather than actionable guidance.

• Community engagement: This is the basic ability to manage developer events or meetups. This means answering developer questions on Slack, GitHub, or forums, collecting feedback from users and passing it to product, or hosting small office hours or AMAs to remove friction. This calls for strong personal discipline to meet deadlines and the ability to work seamlessly with both internal teams and external community members.

• Technical empathy: This is the “soft skill” that makes DevRel powerful. A strong DevRel understands how developers think: Where they get stuck, which errors frustrate them most, or what would make onboarding 10× faster. Technical empathy turns documentation and onboarding from a “read-the-manual” experience into a guided, developer-friendly journey.

Other skills a Devrel should possess are as follows:

• Content Creation
• Curiosity
• Sharing their knowledge
• Strategic & Analytical

Ideally, candidates should have these three core skills at least, but the reality is, very few candidates excel at all three areas. Some are great coders, but can’t write clear tutorials. Others are excellent at community engagement but lack the technical depth to troubleshoot real issues.

This mismatch is why many early DevRel hires underperform, as they simply can’t cover the entire scope of what your startup needs. Instead of looking for a single unicorn DevRel who can do everything, many early-stage B2B SaaS startups find success by combining complementary skill sets and sometimes through a mix of contractors, fractional hires, or agency partners.

Infrasity is a great option as they have taken this approach and built a team-based model that covers the full DevRel spectrum:

• Developer Relations Engineers who create code samples, integrations, and SDK updates

• Technical writers who create clear, developer-friendly documentation.

• Strategists who engage with your audience and turn feedback into product insights.

This lets startups get end-to-end DevRel coverage from day one, all without a long recruitment cycle or overcommitting to a single expensive hire before the role is fully proven out.

Breaking Down the Pain Points of Hiring DevRel in 2025

Now that you know about how to start the recruitment process for DevRel, let’s take a look at the challenges:

1. Long and Costly Hiring Process

Devrel engineers are expensive as they come with atleast 7-8 years of experience. The hiring process of devrel engineers is usually takes 3–6 months, which is a huge challenge for early-stage B2B SaaS startups that need traction fast as it slowing down developer adoption and product feedback loops. This means:

• Long recruiting cycles delay developer onboarding improvements.

• Opportunity cost: every month without DevRel means slower product adoption.

• High cash burn: founders end up spending more time hiring than shipping.

2. Finding the Right Skill Set

As already mentioned in this blog, an ideal DevRel engineer should have the 3 core skills and unfortunately, very few have those skill sets. This is a major pain point as:

• Hiring the wrong candidate can set you back months.

• Some hires turn into “content marketers with code samples,” but can’t build integrations or fix SDK issues.

• Others are highly technical but fail to communicate clearly or engage with the community.

3. High Hiring Cost

A full time Devrels with a decent experience cost around $120K - $180K+ in the US which is a significant expense for a early-stage startup that is still looking for PMF. This is why I’d recommend going for a part-time candidate or partnering with an agency that offers this service because they are extremely cost effective!

4. Risk of Mis-Hire

Since the position of DevRel is relatively new in many b2b SaaS startups, several founders may not have prior experience hiring for it, which may lead to bad hires, wasted budget, and lost momentum. Bad hires will be those candidates who, for instance, are excellent with tech but aren’t nearly as good in communication or vice versa. This risk of misfit would be one of the reasons why it is a struggle to hire good DevRel in 2025.

Final Thought

Hiring your first DevRel engineer is one of the most strategic decisions you will make as a founder or CTO. Done right, it can dramatically improve onboarding, build trust with developers, and accelerate your go-to-market motion. Done wrong, it can drain your runway and slow product adoption. In 2025, the smartest early-stage startups are rethinking the traditional “hire one full-time DevRel” approach and instead leveraging fractional models, contractors, or specialized agencies to get immediate results while staying lean.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the ideal time to hire devrel?

Hire once you have a working product, some early users, and recurring feedback that developers are struggling with onboarding or documentation. Too early, and you risk wasting budget before you even know what developers need.

2. Should I hire a full-time DevRel or start with a fractional/agency model?

For most early-stage B2B SaaS startups, starting with a fractional DevRel or an agency like Infrasity that offers this service is smarter. You’ll get content, tutorials, and feedback loops immediately, without committing $200K+ per year to a single hire.

3. What if I hire the wrong DevRel?

A mis-hire can cost 3-6 months of lost momentum. Avoid this by running a paid trial project before making a full-time offer or by partnering with a DevRel team that covers all key skills- technical writing, code samples, community engagement.