Why we're betting on this role

A large part of our market is in North America, and we want Swarmia to be everywhere our audience is: the dinners, the meetups, and the conferences. Now that AI has turned many of the conversations engineering leaders used to have on social media channels into slop, showing up in person, in a real room with real food counts for more. As our first events person on the ground, your job is to get us there.

The job is to own Swarmia's North American events outright: what we run, who we run it with, and whether any of it actually works. Most of that presence gets built by partnering with marketers at companies who sell to the same people we do, so you'll be co-producing dinners and meetups as much as running our own.

This is the first hire of its kind here, so you'll shape the role as you go. Further down the line, if everything goes as well as we think it will, you could even build the team underneath it.

What you'll do

• Own the North American events calendar. The strategy, the line-up, and the results are all yours. That covers co-organized dinners and our presence at the conferences that matter.
• Build a partner network. Get to know the field marketing folks at companies selling to a similar crowd and co-produce events with them. Splitting the work means shared costs, wider reach, and rooms neither side could fill alone.
• Run our conference presence. You decide which conferences are worth it, then handle the sponsorships from first email to teardown: negotiating packages, sorting out booths and speaking slots, wrangling the logistics, and making sure we get our money's worth.
• Partner with sales. Work with our account executives and BDRs to coordinate invite lists and ensure seamless follow-up after every event.
• Do the hands-on work that makes an event great. Pick the restaurant. Order the books and the sticker sheets. Haul the roll-ups. The small stuff is what separates a night people remember from one they don't.
• Be a face for Swarmia. In the room, in a Slack thread, over email: the kind of person partners and attendees want to hear from again.
• Own the pipeline impact and report on it. Keep track of what worked, what flopped, and what it cost, then use that to make the next quarter's numbers even better.

What we're looking for

• Prior experience in field, partner, or events marketing - ideally at a dev tools or dev-adjacent company, or somewhere else selling to a technical audience.
• A natural connector. Maybe you already know the marketers at companies like ours; maybe you're just the kind of person who makes those friends fast and keeps them.
• A real operator. You can negotiate a co-marketing split in the afternoon and confirm a dietary restriction at 11pm the night before a dinner - and you actually want to do both, not only the glamorous half.
• Organized when it's chaotic. Several events in flight, vendors, shipping, budgets, RSVPs. You keep it all moving without letting the details slip.
• Fluent enough in our world to hold your own in a conversation about engineering and developer productivity. You don't need to have shipped code, but you shouldn't feel lost in a conversation about AI token spend either.
• Based in New York City (or close by). A lot of our dinners and events happen in the city, we've got a small office here, and we want you in the action - the East Coast time zone also gives you decent overlap with Helsinki. Expect to be on the road fairly often for conferences and out-of-town events.

How we work

This is a hybrid role based out of our New York office. We want you in and around the city, because that's where so much of the events work happens. The rest of the team is spread out, with our headquarters in Helsinki. You'll get a lot of ownership and very little red tape. We'll expect you to run with things, and we'll back you when you do.

Interview process

Our interview process is thoughtful and thorough. We want to make sure that every person who joins Swarmia is set up for success, and that you have enough information to decide whether Swarmia is the right place for you. The process for this role is as follows:

• Intro call with Recruiting - 45 minutes
• Hiring manager interview - 60 minutes
• Competence interview to showcase your best work - 60 minutes
• Final panel interview with Leadership onsite in New York - 45 minutes

Benefits

• Base salary of $105,000-$125,000 plus meaningful equity
• Comprehensive benefits, including 401(k) matching
• Flexible model of work
• Great work-life balance - we're a startup, but we don't work at an unsustainable pace (many of us have kids and other responsibilities beyond work)