Technical Program Manager at Openhomefoundation

We are looking for

The Open Home Foundation is looking for a Technical Program Manager based in Europe to join our Home Assistant team. This team is responsible for the open development, maintenance, and enhancement of the Home Assistant platform; supporting new functionality aligned with our roadmap and enabling the wider community to contribute and innovate easily.

In this role, you will guide projects from planning to delivery in full public view. You will keep our engineering roadmaps and tasks transparent, make it easy for contributors to get involved, and ensure resources and people at the Open Home Foundation are used effectively. You will coordinate across engineering, product, communication, and community departments at the Foundation as well as the wider community, and help drive the development of Home Assistant in line with our mission: a smart home that is private, provides choice, and is sustainable.

What you are going to do

• Define, plan, and track projects and deliverables for Home Assistant fully in the open, so contributors and the community can actively join in.

• Monitor the resource allocation for the Home Assistant project for the resources we have available within the Open Home Foundation.

• Coordinate across engineering, product, communication, and community departments to keep work aligned and moving.

• Keep public engineering roadmaps and tasks up to date, and collaborate with our product department on the global roadmap; making sure contributors know what’s happening and where they can help.

• Identifying and mitigating risks, ensuring project iterations are delivered continuously with a high quality standard.

• Drive and refine our open development processes to make contributing easier and more productive. Driving continuous improvement initiatives for the Home Assistant development lifecycle.

• Facilitating communication and ensuring alignment among team members, particularly across different time zones. Our current organization is split across American and European time zones.

What you need to have

• 5+ years of experience managing software development projects from start to finish.

• Excellent organizational and time management skills.

• Strong experience working effectively in a remote, asynchronous environment where written communication drives collaboration.

• Solid experience with issue and project tracking tools, ideally GitHub (others like ClickUp, Jira, or Trello are a plus).

• Strong technical literacy: comfortable reading GitHub issues, understanding dependencies, and following technical discussions (you don’t need to code, but you need to keep up).

• Proven ability to facilitate collaboration across distributed, remote-first teams.

• Professional Fluency in English: Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

• European Residency: You must be currently based and eligible to work within Europe.

It would be great if you also have

• Experience managing or contributing to open-source projects.

• Comfortable engaging with a global, volunteer-driven community.

• Experience with project and issue management on GitHub.

• Awareness of how modern AI tools can be used to improve workflows or team efficiency.

• A passion for smart homes and automation.

• Familiarity with Home Assistant as a user or contributor.

What we offer you

The Open Home Foundation is a fully remote organization that uses Remote to employ people from all over the world. You will be a normal salaried employee in your country.

This is a full-time position for 40 hours per week. Because we are a fully remote company, there is no fixed schedule. For the purpose of team communication, we do try to ensure at least 3 hours of overlap in the workday. You will report to the Home Assistant Lead, who is based in the Netherlands.

Core to the establishment of the Open Home Foundation was the well-being of the people building the future of the smart home. We will provide all the benefits required by the country you reside in. However, we also want to make sure all our employees, regardless of country of origin, get at least a minimal set of benefits, including:

• Five weeks (twenty-five days) of paid time off.

• Fourteen days of paid sick leave if your country/laws treat them as unpaid.

• Six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid parental leave to be used in the first year after birth. We will provide the missing days if your country/laws do not provide such compensation.

• A budget for your work hardware once you start. After three years, you may keep this equipment for personal use.

• An annual smart home budget to ensure you keep up-to-date with the latest that smart homes offer.

• A 50% contribution to your internet connection fee at your home workspace.

• One day every two weeks to work on your personal projects.

• If you are currently working on Home Assistant-related side projects, you can spend work time maintaining them.

When first offering a position to a new member, the Open Home Foundation aims to provide a total compensation package that matches the 75th percentile for the new hire's role, seniority, and local market rates. For a Technical Program Manager in our primary operating countries, the approximate yearly compensation will be the following:

• Netherlands: 75.000-93.000 EUR.

• UK: 70.000-87.000 GBP.

• Spain: 60.000-74.000 EUR.

• Portugal: 56.000-72.000 EUR.

• Other countries: compensation can be discussed during the first interview.

These figures may be adjusted based on experience, qualifications, and work hours.

About us

The Open Home Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Switzerland, with the objective of fighting for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. It does this by supporting the development of open-source projects, and open connectivity and communication standards.

A big part of this is Home Assistant, the biggest open-source project in number of contributors, but the Open Home Foundation also owns or collaborates with other projects important to promoting privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home, like:

• Open hardware tools (e.g., ESPHome, ESP Web Tools).

• Open standards (e.g., Python Matter Server, Z-Wave JS, ZigPy, BTHome, Improv Wi-Fi).

• Open voice (e.g., Rhasspy, Wyoming Protocol, Piper).

• Music Assistant.

The recruitment process

1. Apply for the role.

2. Our HR team will review your application with the hiring manager.

3. Interview with HR.

4. Interview with the department (two department members, from different teams)

5. Interview with the manager.

6. Optional: Interview with the product team.

7. Offer.

8. Join our team!