Open Source Engineer

As an Open Source Engineer at NetBird, you'll focus on building and shipping features for the open source community, especially homelabbers, self-hosters, and technical power users. This is a hands-on, builder role where you'll spend most of your time writing code, talking to the community and experimenting features that make NetBird more useful, flexible, and fun to run in real-world setups.

What you'll 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, not a gatekeeper.
• Maintain and improve tooling around local dev, Docker, Kubernetes, and self-hosted environments.
• Experiment with new ideas, integrations, and workflows that make NetBird easier to hack on.

What you'll need

• 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.

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.

What they offer

• Competitive compensation with salary and equity.
• Hybrid work model between 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.
• Strong engineering culture built around transparency and collaboration.