About the role
Mozilla.org is a mission-driven organization dedicated to keeping the internet open, accessible, and secure. Through a diverse portfolio of products, subsidiaries, and investments, Mozilla.org advances internet technologies, privacy-first solutions, and responsible AI.
Mozilla is looking for a contract-based Community Manager to help build and activate a global community of developers working on open source AI. This is a fixed-term, project-based engagement for someone who knows how to identify the right builders, bring them together in ways that are genuinely useful, and create the partnerships and programs that help a community take root and grow.
The work is not about managing a broad, standing corporate community function. It is about helping Mozilla stand up a specific body of community and ecosystem work in open source AI: events, hackathons, online engagement, partnership development, and community signal-gathering that can inform Mozilla’s broader efforts in this space.
The contractor in this engagement will work closely with senior Mozilla leaders and cross-functional collaborators to help shape community programs that are credible to developers and supported by the right external relationships.
What you'll do — in brief
Own the builder pipeline: the developers, tinkerers, and AI engineers who want to build on open AI infrastructure. You'll help them find each other, find Mozilla, and find reasons to stay engaged. But you'll also help build the external relationships — with companies, projects, and organizations across the ecosystem — that give those programs real weight and staying power.
What you'll do — in detail
Events and in-person community
- Help design and run a program of in-person events in cities where open AI builders are already gathering — not just the major hubs
- Work with ecosystem partners to co-produce events that feel native to the communities they're in
- Own the logistics, the run-of-show, and the follow-through that turns a one-time event into a recurring thing
- Identify the right culminating moments — venues and formats that give the community a chance to show what it's built
Partnerships and sponsorships
- Identify and cultivate relationships with companies, projects, and organizations who want to build alongside the open AI community — not just sponsor a logo on a banner
- Develop and pitch partnership and sponsorship opportunities that are genuine fits: technical collaborators, ecosystem investors, and organizations with shared values
- Structure partnerships that create real value for builders — access to tools, compute, datasets, mentorship, or distribution — not just funding
- Help Mozilla become the kind of partner that other organizations want to work with: trusted, well-networked, and worth the relationship
Online community and ecosystem engagement
- Be present in the online spaces where open-source AI developers actually live: GitHub, Discord, Reddit, Hacker News, and wherever else the conversation is happening
- Build relationships with builders — not just follower counts
- Know who the respected people in the ecosystem are, and help Mozilla become someone they trust
- Surface what the community actually needs — the friction, the gaps, the things nobody's built yet — and feed that back into Mozilla's work
Hackathons and builder programs
- Help design and run hackathons focused on open AI infrastructure — from format to prizes to what happens after the event ends
- Work with internal teams and external partners to make programs feel genuinely useful to builders, not just promotional
- Think about what it means to build with the community, not just for it — and design programs accordingly
- Help turn one-off events into a program with continuity, a clear identity, and the external support to sustain it
Cross-functional coordination
- Work closely with the newsletter, social media, and communications team to make sure what's happening in the community shows up in Mozilla's public voice — and vice versa
- Help turn community moments into content: a great demo, a surprising deployment, a hard-won lesson
- Be the connective tissue between the builders, the partners, and the rest of the CTO team's work
Who you are
- You've built or managed a technical community before — developer relations, open-source, or something adjacent
- You know the difference between a community and an audience, and you've built the former
- You've worked with sponsors or partners before and know how to structure relationships that create real value on both sides — not just transactional ones
- You're comfortable with ambiguity and can operate in early-stage programs where the playbook doesn't exist yet
- You understand how developers think, what they care about, and what makes them roll their eyes
- You're genuinely excited about open-source AI — not as a trend, but as something worth fighting for
- You can hold two things at once: the community's trust, and the organizational relationships that make the programs possible
You might come from developer relations, open-source community management, technical event production, or ecosystem partnership work. Titles matter less than instinct, range, and the ability to build things that outlast you.
What success looks like
- A growing, engaged community of developers building on open AI infrastructure — with Mozilla as the connective tissue
- A regular drumbeat of events, online and in-person, that people actually show up to and come back to
- Partnerships and sponsorships that bring real resources and credibility to the program — and that partners are proud to be part of
- Relationships with builders, organizers, and ecosystem partners that give Mozilla real signal about what's working and what's broken in the open AI stack
- A community that becomes the first audience for Mozilla's research, tools, and public work on open source AI
Engagement model
- Fixed-term contractor engagement
- Flexible, outcome-oriented working model
- Scope centered on community-building, program development, and ecosystem partnership deliverables
- This opportunity is project-based and should not be read as a permanent employee role