Sequoia Open Source Fellowship | Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a global investment firm that backs founders building technology companies. Alongside its investing work, it supports the open source software that much of the internet quietly runs on, work that is often done by individuals in their spare time with no funding behind it. The Sequoia Open Source Fellowship was created to give those developers a stretch of paid time to focus fully on their projects, without asking them to start a company or give up any part of what they build. Past fellows include Sebastián Ramírez, creator of FastAPI, vLLM contributors Woosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li and Simon Mo, and members of the Chatbot Arena team. This role sits within Sequoia's open source programme, which funds independent developers to work on freely available software that anyone can use.

Role

The Sequoia Open Source Fellowship supports developers working to improve an existing open source project or start something new. Fellows choose their own project and roadmap, work remotely, and keep full ownership of everything they build. Only 2 to 3 fellows are selected each year.

Responsibilities

• Lead the direction of your own open source project for the length of the fellowship.
• Set the roadmap and decide which problems are worth solving first.
• Write, test and maintain code that other developers and organisations depend on.
• Improve the reliability, performance and usability of the project.
• Review contributions from the community and help new contributors get started.
• Write clear documentation so people can adopt the project without hand holding.
• Respond to issues raised by users and fix the ones that matter most.
• Release new versions and communicate what changed.
• Grow adoption of the project among developers and organisations who need it.
• Manage your own time and priorities across the full fellowship period.

Requirements

• You maintain or contribute to an open source project that already has real world adoption, or you have a clear plan for a new one.
• Strong software engineering skills in the languages and tools your project uses.
• Ability to plan and run your own work without day to day supervision.
• Willingness to commit 6 to 12 months of focused time to the project.
• Comfortable working fully remotely from wherever you are based.
• Able to communicate clearly in writing with a distributed community of users.
• Experience reviewing code and giving useful feedback to other contributors.
• Care for documentation and for people who are new to the project.
• Comfortable making decisions about scope and direction on your own.
• No travel is required for the fellowship.
• There is no fee to take part and no requirement to form a company.

Benefits

• Living expenses covered for 6 to 12 months so you can work on open source full time.
• Full ownership of everything you build, with no equity taken and no company required.
• Complete freedom to choose your project and set your own roadmap.
• Work remotely from anywhere, with no travel expected.
• Join a small group of fellows alongside well known open source creators.
• Time and space to do deep technical work that is usually squeezed into evenings and weekends.

Apply

Interested candidates can apply through the link given below

Apply >

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