Hiring through FOSS United

Over the last 5 years, the FOSS United foundation has set up FOSS communities all over the country at our 20+ city chapters, 25+ college clubs and hosted 100s of events. The telegram channel, which is the primary means of communication for the community now has over 6000 members, and the broader FOSS United community is expected to be over 20,000 members strong.

The goal of “strengthening the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem in India”, with emphasis on the “ecosystem”, requires us to create meaningful bridges between the industry, academia and FOSS communities. A lot of us frequently complain about the lack of resources and intent in FOSS circles. Our efforts over the past few years have made us reasonably confident in the implications that FOSS deployments can have in the country and its large-scale impact. We now see many good quality FOSS projects coming out of India, with some even forming companies.

Tech hiring in general has shifted its focus to open source. Candidates who have contributed to open source are more likely to have an easier time convincing the recruiter about their skills. However, finding open source talent is not easy.

The vast majority of employers (93%) report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills. This trend is not going away with nearly half (46%) of employers planning to increase their open source hiring in the next six months, and 73% of open source professionals stating it would be easy to find a new role should they choose to move on.

-10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report, Linux Foundation

Communities like FOSS United, where open source developers, contributors and maintainers come together to celebrate the ecosystem are nothing less than a greenfield for anyone looking for top-notch talent. Over the last few months alone, we have helped multiple organisations hire FOSS developers from the community. Interestingly, a lot of the people we’ve referred were FOSS United volunteers at some point. This means that we had worked with them before and were very easily able to vouch for their technical and soft skills!

“We were looking for people who are hackers at heart, through traditional channels the signal to noise ratio was too bad. FOSS United provides access to a niche community of hackers who are truly committed to the trade of building good tech.

At Zerodha we are a tightly knit small community of hackers and the culture very much resonates with how FOSS United community functions. So, naturally our new teammate has been able to easily blend with the team and build good relationships, this in turn helps us tackle complex problems and build solutions.”

-Vinay Kumar, VP, Zerodha Tech

How to hire through FOSS United?

Jobs board

The FOSS United jobs board is one of the frequently visited web pages on our website, and is also regularly promoted in our events, newsletter and social media.

Submitting a hiring application on the jobs board is a very frictionless way to show your interest in hiring FOSS developers. If you want to go a step further, feel free to reach out to us about the application and we’ll be happy to share it with the community, and maybe even refer some of the people we know who might be interested.

Click here to post an opening on the job board.

Events

In 2024, we hosted 100+ FOSS meetups (more than the meetups hosted in the last 4 years before that!), 5 city conferences, an annual hackathon and a conference. The total participants in all of these events combined are over 10,000+!

The FOSS United jobs board was highlighted at most of these events, with some conferences even having their own live job board. At IndiaFOSS specifically, we’ve had sponsors who were there for hiring open source talent, and were able to close tens of openings.

Check out upcoming events on the timeline. If you’d like to hire at the IndiaFOSS conference this year, please reach out to us at indiafoss@fossunited.org.

“We recently hired Sreelakshmi as an Associate Product Manager. I first met her at IndiaFOSS, where she spoke about CQ2, a project she and her co-founder had been building full-time post-graduation. What stood out was her drive to solve real-world problems and the boldness to pursue a business straight out of college. Since joining, she’s taken on everything from product and customer calls to project management and support. At an early-stage startup, versatility is key and she’s making a strong impact already.”

-Anoop MD, Founder and CEO, Bruno

Student Programs

We currently have over 25+ FOSS clubs all over India. College communities help us regularly interact with the student audience of FOSS United, engage them in contribution programs and help them wherever needed.

Programs like FOSSHack and Season of Commits are an effort to evangelise FOSS contributions within academia and enable student developers to not only build their own projects, but also contribute to existing FOSS. These efforts enable us to find student developers with the right skills and intent to contribute to FOSS, and we are always happy to refer them to organisations we work with.

“FOSS United helped me to get my role at LambdaTest. It only took 4 days of interviews and the work there has been great.

I’ve been running the Delhi chapter for 2 years now and helped to foster OSS in the city.”

-Swastik Baranwal, SDE (OSPO) Intern, Lambdatest

Hiring Partnerships with FOSS United

“The FOSS United community has some of the best hackers in the country.

Smart, driven and exposed to the industry.

Ente has been lucky to hire some excellent minds with help from the FOSS United team.”

-Vishnu Mohandas, CEO, Ente

Organisations today spend a lot of time and resources in finding the right candidates (even through referral programs) and still struggle to find open source talent. Helping organisations hire FOSS developers who are looking for careers in open source is one of the many long term focus areas of FOSS United. Considering how diverse the broader FOSS community is, we can help companies find not just good technical talent, but also FOSS product managers, OSPOers, community managers and advocates, developer relation engineers, designers etc.

If you’re an organisation with an open source product and ethos, we invite you to partner with us as part of your hiring strategy. Here are a few ways to do this -

Be an active part of the community - Active presence at FOSS United events and community forums is a great way to showcase your organisation and tap into a network of FOSS-aligned community members. Just posting an hiring update on the telegram channel/jobs board will attract a good number of applicants.

Become an Industry Partner - The FOSS United Industry Partnerships Program is a way for you to support our activities throughout the year. Industry Partners are highlighted across every event and activity that we conduct. We regularly engage with partners on ways to collaborate and can actively help them out with job openings and referrals. If you’re looking for a deeper engagement within the community, this is the best way.

Sponsor a local/national event - If you’re looking to hire from within the local community, consider sponsoring a “CityFOSS” event near to you. This ensures targeted outreach within a community that you can actively engage with. If you have a reasonably bigger hiring pool, we invite you to sponsor our annual flagship events - IndiaFOSS and FOSSHack as a hiring partner.

Support a Program - Another way of targeted outreach based on specific candidate pools is to support a particular FOSS United program. For example, if you regularly hire fresh grads, you can consider partnering with the FOSS Clubs initiative which allows you to regularly engage with our student audience. If you are a civil society or related org that is looking to hire tech/public policy folks, you may consider joining one of our Public Policy iniatives.

We’d love for you to join the growing list of organisations hiring open source talent through FOSS United. Hiring for a single role or building a long-term hiring strategy? Please reach out to us at foundation[at]fossunited[dot]org and we’d love to chat!