Founding Developer Advocate, Agentic Payments
San Francisco · Full-time Remote · Founding team
Agents are starting to buy things and the payments world is facing important questions: How do you give an agent a card without handing it your whole wallet? How does a user set limits on what (and how) it spends? How does anyone trace what happened when things go wrong? What does trust look like in this new paradigm?
We're looking for someone who is excited by where agentic payments is going and wants to be at the forefront of answering the questions the ecosystem is asking.
About Basis Theory
Basis Theory builds the infrastructure developers use to secure and move payments across any processor, flow, or partner. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Costanoa Ventures, and Kindred, we are the market-leading payments vault, working with global merchants, platforms and leading fintechs around the world.
Agentic payments is our next frontier and we're hiring our first Developer Advocate to fly the Basis Theory flag across the SF and broader agentic-AI ecosystem. This role will help shape how the world thinks about agent payments and bring the Basis Theory platform to the forefront of developers’ work.
The mission
Build a trusted, recurring presence in the agentic payments builder community. Where this doesn't exist, we want you to create it! This is a unique opportunity to influence the technical and user patterns that emerge as agentic payment infrastructure takes shape.
The purpose of this role is to make Basis Theory the obvious choice for how agents should handle money. You'll create and share clear, useful thinking on where agentic payments are going and how Basis Theory is the choice of developers to get there quickly, securely, and at scale. This is a founding role and the right candidate will have significant influence on the team as we grow.
What you'll do
- Show up in the rooms where people are talking: Meetups, hackathons, technical conferences, founder and developer events, and community gatherings, in SF and on the road. You'll be a familiar, friendly face, not a booth
- Build meaningful relationships: Get to know AI-agent builders and fintech engineers, especially at small, fast-moving companies. Be the Batphone they text when they hit a payments question or have an idea they want to workshop
- Lead the conversation: You’ll have strong but educated opinions and voice them where conversations are taking place. We want you to have a take on where agentic payments are going across agent checkout, authorization and credential safety, user intent and control, and developer ergonomics.
- Give talks people remember: You'll have the creative freedom to deliver technically credible talks and workshops of your own design and thinking with input from our R&D team as needed
- Write what practitioners want to read: creative freedom to report and write about what you're experiencing from event recaps and technical explainers that become a center of gravity for the agentic payments world
- Bring the field home: Spot the recurring friction, unsafe shortcuts, missing primitives and category confusion builders run into, to help our engineering team build better
What this role is not
This is a field role where you'll spend most of your time out in the world, not behind a desk.
- You won't own every SDK, sample app or docs page. Our engineering teams handle the durable artefacts.
- You won't work directly on our platform but act as the voice of developers to our engineering teams building out our platform
- You won't carry an enterprise pipeline quota or a content-volume target. Signal that the ecosystem trusts you is the most important thing.
Who you are
Above all else: you light up at the thought of being out in the ecosystem, representing a company and platform you believe in, and coming back with actionable insights from the field
- Based in San Francisco, and energized by travel, speaking and meeting new people.
- Technical enough to build and explain a working integration, and to handle hard, unscripted engineering questions from a skeptical room
- Insatiably curious. You love learning new things and enjoy staying at the forefront of where AI and agentic is going.
- A public track record of technical communication: talks, workshops, demos, code samples, technical writing or community building.
- Great instincts with early-stage builders. Curious, direct, and comfortable discussing emerging territory without dressing up speculation as fact.
- An existing community network in AI or fintech is a real plus.
Bonus points if you've run meet-ups or hackathons, shipped agent-based projects, or worked anywhere near payments, auth or identity.
