Careers

We’re hiring! Join the GNOME Foundation team and help us build a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust.

Executive Director

Our Ideal Executive Director

We are looking for an individual with existing experience in the wider nonprofit community, ideally with prior experience establishing and raising funds for programs that deliver impact through technology. Working closely with the existing members, contributors, volunteers, and wider GNOME community, and managing our relationships with the Advisory Board and other key Free and Open Source Software partners, we hope to find a candidate that can build public awareness and help people learn about, use, and benefit from what GNOME has built over the past two decades.

As Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation, you will assume both strategic and execution responsibility for our organization. You have a passion for using your strategic skills to make a difference within the technology space. You will play a key role in identifying and building partnership networks and relationships for strategic gain. You are powerfully skilled in steering innovative thinking, to develop strategy, to facilitate change and impact. You lead with empathy and can effectively connect and collaborate both with team members internally from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, and with partners in the wider for-profit and nonprofit ecosystem who are essential for achieving our goals. You are comfortable with technology, and ideally familiar with Open Source or other collaborative Open Culture organizations and values, giving you a solid basis to understand and work with our project and community to achieve real impact in the programs you are responsible for.

The Foundation staff is a distributed team from around the globe, working with a global community of contributors, volunteers, corporate stakeholders, and donors who support the Foundation and GNOME projects. We offer flexible working hours and locations as a matter of course. We are a small and friendly team with a passion for our unique role within the GNOME community and everything we do to support and grow the impact of our mission.

Required Skills and Experience

  • 5+ years experience in nonprofit management, establishing and overseeing programs to achieve the desired mission impact
  • Strong experience developing, establishing, and managing partnership relationships with stakeholders, including for-profit and nonprofit entities, both for fundraising and programmatic collaboration
  • Ability to grow revenues to approximately $1M per annum to drive impact and sustainability of the Foundation
  • Staff management experience including leading hiring, onboarding, and providing day-to-day staff management
  • Experience working at a volunteer-driven organization, coordinating and motivating contributors with open and transparent processes
  • An effective communicator with experience with public messaging and delivering presentations about the mission and values of the project
  • Tech-savvy and works well with engineers, designers, and other disciplines
  • Excellent strategic thinking skills – ability to define, challenge, interpret and align objectives into long and short-term programs that deliver high impact
  • Highly organized and efficient facilitator, able to manage progress on multiple projects simultaneously
  • Experience working with remote-first or distributed teams (e.g. a company that has operated in multiple locations, or ideally a globally distributed and remote workforce)
  • Ability to travel domestically in the US and internationally to represent the Foundation at conferences and industry events

Preferred Skills and Experience

  • B.A. or equivalent level qualification in a relevant field or equivalent experience
  • Experience in working in the U.S. nonprofit sector and maintaining compliance as a public charity
  • Prior experience and familiarity working with Open Source and/or Open Culture projects and organizations (e.g. EFF, Creative Commons, WikiMedia, OSM, etc.)
  • Existing knowledge and relationships with other nonprofit organizations, foundations, and grantmaking organisations within the U.S. and overseas
  • Ability to develop and manage program evaluations and surveys to help measure the impact of programs
  • Prior experience partnering with marketing specialists to build and run successful campaigns to reach target users directly, and build supporting materials for effective partnership engagements.

Compensation

  • Base salary up to $150k, depending on experience
  • 30 days PTO (including Federal holidays)
  • Unlimited sick days
  • Comprehensive healthcare cover for US applicants
  • 401(k) retirement savings for US applicants with a basic safe harbor match

How To Apply

Please apply via e-mail with a covering letter and a resume to careers+executive-director@gnome.org by the 29th of August.

About the GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Foundation is a nonprofit organization that believes in a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We do this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. The GNOME community is an influential social and technical contributor to the Free Software and Open Source software stack that continues to leave its mark on every piece of hardware that runs Linux across all technical market segments.

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce an open source and freely-accessible desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for Linux operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise, and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices. The Foundation is a member-directed, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides financial, organizational, and legal support to the GNOME project, as well as pursuing impact-driven programs to drive our vision and mission.

We are developing impact and outreach programs in the following three areas:

  • Growing a diverse and skilled contributor base. We’d like to seek external funding to support and scale up the existing initiatives run by the community to welcome diverse newcomers into GNOME and grow our contributor base. The Open Source development and collaboration skills that candidates develop during these internship and apprenticeship schemes are valuable to employers. The GNOME community has a great reputation in this space we can promote, we can use to raise funds from employers’ CSR / DE&I funds, properly compensate mentors, and create materials to support newcomers in the future.
  • Diverse and sustainable Linux app ecosystem. We are adding donations and payments to the Flathub app store to improve financial sustainability and remove barriers to participating in our community. We believe the existence of this is critically important for individual developers and contributors to unlock earning potential from our ecosystem. A healthy app ecosystem also improves the usefulness of the Linux desktop as a whole for our users. We believe that we can build a case for commercial vendors in the space to join an advisory board alongside with GNOME, KDE, etc to input into the governance and contribute to the costs of growing Flathub.
  • Local-first / decentralized applications for GNOME. There are many different threats to free access to computing and information in today’s world. The GNOME desktop and apps need to give users convenient and reliable access to technology that works similarly to the tools they already use every day but keeps them and their data safe from surveillance, censorship, filtering, or just being completely cut off from the Internet. We believe that we can seek both philanthropic and grant funding for this work. It will make GNOME a more appealing and comprehensive offering for the many people who want to protect their privacy.

The GNOME Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer

GNOME provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.