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Technical Evangelism, a fairly young discipline, may contain fewer than a thousand people today.  A few folks may be doing it part time and others who think that they are doing it when they are really not.  Overall, it’s a really fun job: you get to meet smart people, learn new technologies, create fun demos and travel to various conferences.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine, a software engineer, and we got to talking about the different emphasis of our jobs. I came through the development ranks so it was easy for me to compare what I used to do with what I am doing right now. If you are a developer looking for a more outward facing role, this article is for you.

Number one thing you have to remember: as a technical evangelist your job is to market.  The metrics are about how many developers outside of your company adopt your API.  Most of the technical evangelism organizations I have interacted with have one or more objective metrics.  Those metrics are a combination of the following:

Applications that integrate with your API.
Developer sandboxes requested.
The size of the registered developers in your community.
Satisfaction of the people that attend your events.

Some people add intermediate goals to this such as the number of blog posts, or samples or various activities, but I think at the end of it all the four categories above directly impact the revenue and help sales.  The general activity of a technical evangelist consists of:

Working with the customers and partners.
Writing about your technology.
Presenting at conferences.
Hosting webinars.
Creating demos.

Having a background in software development absolutely helps because developers are a tough crowd, but you will need to extend yourself beyond the code.  The developers who I have seen fail at this job might have been great engineers, but could never cross the social chasm to start connecting with others to educate them about the value of the technology they were evangelizing.  If you can do it, it’s well worth the trip you will probably be blazing on the trail of our joint technological future.

Mike Borozdin is Developer Programs Manager at DocuSign and is currently hiring a technical evangelist in San Francisco. Find Mike on Twitter.

It can be hard to find good news regarding employment thanks the recent financial downturn. Apparently no one told Amazon, who on their Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog announced that they have over 100 positions to fill (it has gone from under 100 to over 100 in the past few weeks):

I’d like to highlight a few of the nearly one hundred open positions on the AWS team. If you are a software engineer, manager, technical writer, program manager, or product manager and you like to work on cutting-edge projects with world-scale impact, you owe it to yourself to look at these positions.

Job hunters can find links open positions in the US and Europe from the AWS career page. There are a huge range of jobs available, including UI designers, software development engineers, database administration, marketing, technical writing and much more, with a number of the positions working APIs and services like  S3, SimpleDB, Mechanical Turk and Elastic Compute. Here’s a sample of the openings:

PHP SDK Developer – You are an experienced PHP developer with a passion for PHP APIs and a desire to help thousands of PHP developers use the AWS cloud to build PHP-based web and Facebook applications quickly (position 110634).
Software Developer – You are a self-starting, self-directing Java developer who is creative and passionate about developing web-based applications which will be used by thousands of developers (position 110635).
Senior Development Manager – You are a dynamic, innovative, and hands-on software development manager who will lead the production of AJAX web apps that enable customers to use our cloud computing services through point-and-click, web-based interfaces.  You will be responsible for leading a central platform team of talented and nimble engineers that work with several teams across AWS to produce great developer tools and websites for our customers (position 110632).
Senior Software Developer – You will fundamentally change the way people build, deploy, and manage cloud applications in a small team running fast to offer AWS customers a brand new service.  You will apply your experience building reliable, scalable, data driven distributed applications, knowledge of web protocols, and in-depth knowledge of several application servers, Linux tools and Java EE architectures. (position 109479).

AWS is certainly one of the big names in cloud computing. Their customers include some big names like The New York Times and Nasdaq, and their App Catalog lists a variety of applications that build on the platform.

You can also find more about the AWS offerings by checking-out the 18 Amazon APIs in our directory.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Amazon S3 API Profile, 57 mashups