How Developer Relations is Changing at Elastic

Philipp Krenn is the Head of Developer Relations at Elastic, where he leads a global team helping developers understand, adopt, and build with complex distributed systems across search, observability, and security.

Originally trained as a web developer and DevOps engineer, Philipp’s career evolved through curiosity, community building, and a deep passion for technical learning. He began organizing meetups and speaking at conferences across Europe before transitioning into developer advocacy—long before DevRel was a well-defined discipline.

Today, Philipp is known for his clear thinking on the role of developer relations inside modern organizations, his insistence on technical depth over personal branding, and his belief that DevRel works best as a two-way feedback loop between developers and engineering teams. He regularly writes and speaks about DevRel strategy, developer education, open source communities, and how emerging technologies like LLMs are reshaping how developers learn and prototype.