Introducing Tejas Kumar, Developer Relations Engineer

Hello! I’m Tejas Kumar, and I’ve been building on the web for over 20 years at places like Spotify, Vercel, Xata, and more. Today, I have the great joy of writing that I’ve recently joined DataStax as a developer relations engineer. Let’s talk about this in some detail, starting with why.

Why DataStax?

Prior to joining DataStax, I ran a successful developer relations consultancy that supported developer-loved tools like Replay.io, FlightControl, OpenSauced, Liveblocks, and more as happy clients. I thoroughly enjoyed the work I got to do with this variety of clients and the people I got to do it with. The consultancy grew pretty successful, joining forces with HackMamba at some point and having a solid content team. However, running a startup—either product-based or consulting-based—in Germany where I’m based often had me spending an enormous amount of time on bureaucratic and legal matters instead of building truly great developer experiences. This was not what I signed up for.

Eventually, my dear friend (and now coach) DataStax developer relations leader Carter Rabasa mentioned he was hiring for a role that leaned heavily into AI. It was around this time that I had been working deeply in AI and cultivating skills with LangChain, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques, semantic caching with vector similarity, and more, and I figured “why not?” The key reasons being:

1. I was already doing this work anyway

2. Carter is a trusted friend

3. AI is eating the world

I applied and was led through a genuinely world-class interview experience with some incredible people. After all of that, here I am. It’s great to be here.

What do I do here?

So far, it’s a combination of research and support in the field of generative AI. Research includes keeping up-to-date on the zeitgeist of AI: exploring answers to questions like “what’s going on at Google I/O?” “What are the latest capabilities of Gemini?” “What constitutes an ‘omnimodel’?” while also creating powerful SDKs, frameworks, abstractions, and developer tools to support AI workflows. Research also includes discovering problems with GenAI today, like the problems of cost at scale, and working to find meaningful solutions to them, like using Astra DB serverless as a vector store for semantic caching.

In terms of research and support, the support side of things looks closer to textbook devrel work: teaching the community about AI best practices, attending events, holding workshops, writing documentation, creating videos, and so on. In such a rapidly evolving field as AI, I count it a huge blessing that these are my key responsibilities and I aim to do a great job of it.

What do I hope to achieve at DataStax?

DataStax is known among developers for Apache Cassandra, or at least was at the time I joined. I’d like to help DataStax pivot to being the de-facto leader among developers for AI use cases by helping create a world-class developer experience and developer tooling through a mix of design engineering, research, support, and product iteration. Getting there will inspire the 95% of web developers who have not yet started their journey with GenAI to jump in, which is a wonderful and complementary wider mission that I’m excited about.

I’d like to do this while not having to deal with German bureaucracy and the other busy work of running a business. This is what makes this job a true dream job for me.

Conclusion

The GenAI space is young, the road is long, the pace is rapid. I am here for all of it and I’m thrilled to move the industry forward in whatever way I can. I’d invite you to come along for the ride! Right now, we’re hiring for some roles; please come work with me! You can find more information on the DataStax careers page. I might be in the honeymoon phase, but so far DataStax truly is a great place to work. You’d make it better.