Roles / Open-Source Hardware Community Manager

Open-Source Hardware Community Manager

STD-022v1

Standards, Consortia, Analysts & Industry EcosystemEnablingIC4–IC7IC or manager

Also known as: Open-Source Silicon Community Lead; RISC-V Community Manager; Open Hardware Ecosystem Manager; Technical Community Program Manager

See this role on the SoC lifecycle

Summary

Grows and governs the contributor community around open hardware and open-source silicon — RISC-V International, CHIPS Alliance, OpenHW, OpenROAD, open PDKs — so that an ecosystem of competitors and volunteers ships coherent, usable IP and tooling.

A day in the life

Work in progressNo day-in-the-life description has been written for this role yet. If you do this work, we would welcome yours. Suggest a source or a correction

Responsibilities

Project

Work done for a product or program.

Govern the project's contribution model, including maintainer structure, CLA or DCO policy, code of conduct enforcement and release governance.
Grow the contributor base across member companies, universities and independent developers, and convert casual users into sustained maintainers.
Coordinate technical special interest and task groups, such as RISC-V extension groups or verification and toolchain working groups, toward ratified deliverables.
Run community events, hackathons, tapeout shuttles such as open MPW programmes, and documentation sprints.
Mediate disputes between member companies over fragmentation, non-standard extensions and downstream forks.
Produce onboarding documentation, getting-started flows and reference designs that lower the barrier for new contributors.
Track and report ecosystem health metrics including contributor counts, pull request latency, issue backlog, downstream adoption and silicon implementations.
Represent the project publicly at conferences and with press, analysts and prospective member companies.
Align the open project with formal standards and certification efforts so open implementations can claim conformance.

Function

Work that keeps the discipline running: methods, tools, suppliers and people.

Manage the repository and release infrastructure, CI policy, licence hygiene (Apache 2.0, Solderpad, CERN OHL) and dependency provenance.

Major tasks

Project

Produce and hand over the role's key deliverables
- Project governance and contribution policy documents
- Release and CI infrastructure with licence compliance gates
- Special interest group charters and ratified specifications or IP releases
- Community event and shuttle programme plans
- Onboarding documentation and reference design set
- Ecosystem health metrics dashboard and annual community report
Support programsGeneral
- Agree what each program needs
- Deliver in time for milestones
Manage issuesGeneral
- Track requests to closure
- Escalate risks

Function

Run the functionGeneral
- Maintain policies and processes
- Keep records and controls
ImproveGeneral
- Report performance
- Lead improvement work

Works with

Project maintainers and contributors
member-company engineering leads
foundation staff and boards
university research groups
EDA and IP vendors
open PDK and shuttle programme partners
standards working groups

Typical backgrounds

BS/MS in computer or electrical engineering; 7–15 years combining RTL design or EDA engineering with open-source project experience; some arrive from developer relations with strong hardware literacy.

Demand signal

0 open listings right now
0 Talent Wafer employer inquiries

Counts live listings tagged to this role, and employer interest in candidates from Talent Wafer runs for this role (all runs to date). Hub activity only, not the wider market.

Comp tier (within semis)

3 / 5

Remote feasibility

High

Semis core vs. portable

Semis-primary, transfers

Geographic hotspots

Silicon Valley, Zurich, Cambridge UK, Bangalore, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Munich, Barcelona, Tokyo, Austin

Certifications / standards training

— ; Linux Foundation open-source governance and OpenChain training; RISC-V International working group participation

Transfers to (industries)

Open-source software foundations, robotics and drone open platforms (ROS, PX4), open automotive software (COVESA, AGL), scientific instrumentation communities, open standards bodies

Risk if vacant

Contributors drift away, pull requests rot, competing member companies fork the codebase, and the open ecosystem loses the coherence that made it an alternative to proprietary IP.

Open-Source Hardware Community Manager

Summary

A day in the life

Responsibilities

Project

Function

Major tasks

Project

Function

Works with

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