Open Source Engineer

🏢 Who we are

A team from Germany with the vision to make advanced network security accessible for everyone

We are a software company developing an open source zero-trust network security platform that is both easy to use and affordable for teams of all sizes and budgets. Our mission is grounded in a simple yet powerful belief: secure private networking is a fundamental right of every modern company.

Since our launch on GitHub in 2021, we have gained trust among thousands of companies seeking secure and seamless solutions for connecting remote employees and infrastructure. By replacing traditional centralized VPNs, NetBird has become a trusted choice for modern network security, connecting today hundreds of thousands of users and machines worldwide. Our open source, community-driven approach has been a key driver of our success. We listen to our users, and their input helps us make network security better for everyone.

Want to see what we're working on? Check out our GitHub repo at https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird or https://netbird.io/knowledge-hub

✏️ What you will do

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. 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.

You will:

• 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.
• Help keep NetBird approachable, hackable, and fun for contributors.

🔎 What we are looking for

We’re looking for an Open Source Engineer who combines deep technical leadership with a passion for open source collaboration.

Must-Haves

• 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-Haves

• 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’s in for you

We want you to do meaningful work and be proud of what you build.

That’s why we offer:

• 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.