All experience
Developer Evangelist
Xero · Melbourne
Helped grow Xero's app ecosystem from 500+ to 1,000+ partners in three years — partner technical support, certification, SDK and API content, and sales enablement.
Overview
Xero's app marketplace depends on thousands of developers integrating with its accounting APIs. Jenks joined as a Developer Evangelist to grow and support that partner ecosystem.
What Jenks did
- Handled new prospective developer partner enquiries and technical evaluations.
- Provided technical support to partners integrating with the Xero developer API.
- Ran new-partner integration certification testing and reviews.
- Managed relationships with an assigned portfolio of developer partners.
- Communicated with the developer community: forums, tweets, blog posts, videos and talks.
- Worked with sales, business development and customer support so they knew the partner ecosystem; helped Strategic Partner Account Managers identify, validate and win deals with an app-partner component; supported partner marketing for certification.
- Worked on SDKs, OpenAPI specifications and code generation for client libraries.
Achievements
- Ecosystem partners grew from 500+ to 1,000+ over three years.
- Spoke at apidays (Jakarta) on integration resilience and on machine-learning-powered API governance — anomaly detection and clustering of partner API usage.
- Earned Xero Evangelist, Advisory, Migration and Payroll certificates.
Why it matters to employers
Developer evangelism at a listed SaaS company blends engineering, support, marketing and sales. It proves Jenks can make an API platform commercially successful — and the API-governance work was an early example of applying machine learning to a platform problem.