How to Write a Job Posting for an Open Source Office Lead - Linux Foundation

By Benjamin VanEvery

I ran into several folks this past week at OSCON who expressed a keen interest in creating a dedicated role for Open Source at their respective companies. So what was stopping them? One simple thing: every single one of them was struggling to define exactly what that role means. Instinctively we all have a feeling of what an employee dedicated to Open Source might do, but when it comes time to write it down or try to convince payroll, it can be challenging. Below I have included a starting point for a job description of what a dedicated Open Source manager might do. If you are in this boat, I’d highly recommend that you also check out the slides from our talk at OSCON this year. In addition, the many blog posts we’ve published about why our respective companies run Open Source.

Also, on top of reusing what is below, we are collecting open source office job descriptions on GitHub from the industry that you can learn from.

The Job Posting Template

Side note: if you use this template, try running it through analysis on https://textio.com/talent/ first.

The Mission

Our open source effort is currently lead by a multi-functional group of engineers and we are looking for a motivated, visionary individual to lead this effort and take Company Open Source to the next level.

In this role, you’ll work with our Engineering (Dev & Ops), Legal, Security, Business Ops, and Public Relations teams to help define what Open Source at Company means and build our open source community. Your day to day responsibilities will alternate between programming and several forms of program management. This is an exciting opportunity to work with all levels of the organization and leave a lasting impact here and on the engineering community at large.

A good match might have (a)…

• 8 years experience coding in or leading software engineering environments
• Experience working on at least one successful and widely recognized open source project
• Excellent communication and organizational skills
• Familiarity with GitHub and open source CI tooling (Travis CI, Coveralls, etc)
• Understanding of open source licenses
• Experience and familiarity with multiple programming languages
• Real passion for quality and continuous improvement

Some things you might find yourself doing

• You will lead and streamline all aspects of the outgoing open source process. This encompasses people processes to tooling automation.
• You will own and handle our open source presence and reputation on GitHub and beyond
• You will steer involvement and recognition of the open source program internally
• You will work alongside product and business leadership to integrate Open Source goals with company goals. Overall, working to build Open Source mentality into our DNA.
• You will build awareness of Company Open Source externally and increase overall involvement in the open source community.
• You will establish Company as an actively contributing member of industry-leading Open Source initiatives. This involves taking active parts in TODO Group initiatives.
• You will run our process for evaluating incoming open source code for use in our product.

This article originally appeared at TODO