15 REGIONAL ✣
Developer Relations in India.
India has the largest concentration of working developers of any country and one of the fastest-growing DevRel scenes globally. By many measures it is now the most strategically important geography for DevRel program expansion outside No…
India has the largest concentration of working developers of any country and one of the fastest-growing DevRel scenes globally. By many measures it is now the most strategically important geography for DevRel program expansion outside North America.
Scale
- GitHub developers. India has consistently been among the top 2–3 countries by GitHub developer count, often overtaking the United States in raw number of new GitHub signups annually.
- Developer-conference attendance. Major Indian developer events (Rootconf, JSFoo, PyCon India, GIDS) draw thousands.
- Corporate DevRel. Most major US-headquartered developer-product companies operate India-based DevRel teams (AWS, Microsoft, Google, MongoDB, HashiCorp, Stripe, Twilio, etc.).
Notable Indian DevRel practitioners
A non-exhaustive sample of senior practitioners:
- Aditya — Developer Advocate at Appwrite; Microsoft MVP; DigitalOcean Wavemaker; CMX Community Industry Award 2024 (Best DevRel Professional). DevRelCon Bengaluru 2024 co-organiser.
- Divya Mohan — Principal Technology Advocate at SUSE; Steering Committee, DevRel Foundation.
- Tabs — DevRel Engineer; Steering Committee, DevRel Foundation; active in APAC.
- Akshay Saini — Independent JavaScript educator with substantial audience.
- Tanay Pratap — Engineer-educator with substantial public presence.
- Many more across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR.
Major Indian developer communities and events
- DevRelCon Bengaluru. Indian edition of the global DevRel conference series.
- Rootconf. DevOps / cloud / SRE conference, Bangalore. Long-running.
- JSFoo. JavaScript-focused.
- PyCon India. Python community; rotates Indian cities.
- GIDS (Great Indian Developer Summit). General developer conference.
- HasGeek conferences. Series of smaller curated tech events.
- The Developer’s Conference (TDC) India.
- Devfests organised by Indian Google Developer Groups.
- AWS Community Days India.
Distinctive characteristics of Indian DevRel
- Strong engineering-side talent pool. Many DevRel professionals transition from engineering roles at major IT services companies (TCS, Infosec, Wipro, Cognizant) or product companies into DevRel.
- Heavy student and early-career engagement. Indian DevRel programs often invest heavily in college outreach because the student-developer population is large and disproportionately influential.
- Multi-language content. Effective Indian DevRel often includes regional-language content (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc.) in addition to English.
- Compensation differentials. USD-denominated compensation at Indian DevRel roles for global companies can be highly competitive locally even at levels that would be modest in the US.
What’s growing
- AI-engineering DevRel in India. Substantial cohort of senior AI developers; AI-company DevRel teams (Hugging Face contributors, LangChain community, etc.) have strong Indian representation.
- Founder-led developer products. A growing crop of India-headquartered developer-product companies (e.g. Postman, which is India-founded though San Francisco–headquartered; Appwrite; various AI-engineering startups).
- Regional flagship events as Indian developer-product companies start hosting their own flagship conferences.