Open Source Engineer

The role

You will build and ship open source features for homelabbers, self-hosters, and technical power users. You will work across the stack to improve self-hosting, local deployments, and community-driven use cases.

What you will do

• Build and ship open source features used by homelabbers and self-hosters.
• Work across the stack to improve self-hosting, local deployments and community-driven use cases.
• Pick up ideas directly from GitHub issues, discussions, and community feedback and turn them into working code.
• Improve developer experience, docs, examples and setup flows for OSS users.
• Review and collaborate on community pull requests as a peer.
• Maintain and improve tooling around local dev, Docker, Kubernetes, and self-hosted environments.
• Experiment with new ideas, integrations, and workflows.
• Help keep NetBird approachable, hackable, and fun for contributors.

Required qualifications

• 3+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, with strong full-stack capabilities.
• Experience building, maintaining, or leading open source projects.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives.
• Strong understanding of backend systems, APIs, and distributed architectures.
• Experience with frontend technologies and developer-facing UIs.
• Ability to make and communicate architectural and technical decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Experience with Go, TypeScript, React, or similar modern stacks.
• Strong experience with unit and integration testing principles.
• A community-first mindset and belief in open development.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with networking, security, or Zero Trust architectures.
• Experience managing roadmaps and technical direction.
• Public GitHub profile with meaningful contributions.
• Experience growing developer communities.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation with salary and equity.
• Hybrid work model between our Berlin office and remote.
• High-impact role shaping both product and community.
• Real technical ownership of a global open source platform.
• Direct influence on NetBird's architecture and roadmap.
• A strong engineering culture built around transparency and collaboration.
• Career growth as NetBird becomes a leading open source security company.

About the company

NetBird is a software company developing an open source zero-trust network security platform. The team is from Germany with the vision to make advanced network security accessible for everyone.