Ecosystem Engineering and Operations Lead- Remote Contractor

About the Role

We are seeking a highly motivated and autonomous Ecosystem Engineering and Operations Lead to support the ongoing operations of a high-impact open source project. This is a full-time role focused on maintaining and evolving the release processes, technical infrastructure, and interaction with members and community across a complex and widely adopted open source ecosystem.

The role will work across multiple domains—including release engineering, automation systems (e.g., autobuilders), CVE and security management, documentation, and community/member support—to ensure timely execution, quality, and alignment with Technical Steering Committee (TSC) direction and Yocto Project governance board (GB) goals.

Key Responsibilities

TSC Operations

• Drive TSC priorities and action items to completion

• Drive technical resource prioritization to meet roadmap goals.

• Own proposal lifecycle execution.

• Direct stakeholder communications to achieve alignment and coordinated delivery of roadmap goals.

Release Process Management

• Define and execute bi-annual releases per Yocto Project's release lifecycle and guided by the planning roadmap

• Manage and communicate build milestones, feature progress, and dependencies to ensure transparency and on-time delivery.

• Monitor codebase, bug status, nightly builds, and feature readiness, coordinating with QA and build systems to trigger releases and ensure their quality and stability.

• Drive release notes and migration guides review for accuracy, clarity, and usability for appropriate audiences.

• Communicate project status consistently to keep the community engaged and stakeholders aligned.

Build & Integration Oversight (Autobuilder/CI)

• Facilitate patch review calls

• Drive resolution of high-impact and intermittent build issues with build and integration engineering, maintainers, and the community.

• Ensure regular performance, patch, and CVE metrics reporting with visualization

• Contribute to autobuilder tooling improvements

Member Services & Benefits

• Onboard members to CI infrastructure and manage layer testing enablement

• Manage and fulfill hosting, mirror, and mailing list requests from member organizations

• Ensure timely communication and approvals for member-specific testing and services

Documentation & Communication

• Help draft and coordinate project communications

• Ensure documentation is up to date, covering key features and new development

Security & CVE Coordination

• Monitor and maintain CVE tracking and reporting tools

• Coordinate with maintainers and the Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) on high-priority issues to ensure issues are resolved

• Ensure discussion and planning to align tooling with evolving industry standards and upstream changes

Cross-Functional Technical Support

• Coordinate and facilitate communication, planning and goals with various maintainer roles (kernel, pseudo, LTS, security, QA, etc.)

• Assist with technical proposal implementation as delegated by the TSC

• Track issues through to resolution using issue trackers, mailing lists, and internal tooling

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of technical program management or engineering project coordination in software development environments

• Proven experience in open source communities, ideally in infrastructure, CI/CD, or embedded systems projects

• Demonstrated bias for action, autonomy, and ability to drive complex technical programs independently

• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, especially in remote and async environments

• Familiarity with release cycles, CI/CD infrastructure, and issue tracking systems (e.g., Bugzilla)

• Comfortable working across multiple time zones and cultures

• Comfortable with email/patch based workflows and IRC

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing or contributing to open source release engineering, build infrastructure (e.g., Buildbot), or security tooling

• Understanding of embedded Linux environments, OE-core/bitbake/Yocto Project, or similar ecosystems

• Familiarity with CVE processes, patch metrics, and performance tracking in open source projects

• Hands-on experience with Git, CI pipelines, test automation, and documentation workflows

• Familiarity with open source governance and community dynamics

Salary $250,000 - 275,000 USD

Work Environment

• Fully remote role with preference for candidates in EU or EST time zones
• Collaborative team environment with global contributors and stakeholders
• Reports to program leadership and works closely with technical maintainers, engineers, and governance representatives

Why Join Us?
This is a unique opportunity to influence one of the most widely adopted open source projects in the embedded and systems space. You’ll collaborate with top engineers and organizations around the world, shaping the direction and delivery of software that powers critical applications.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded system deployments in connected edge devices, servers, or virtual environments, regardless of the hardware architecture.