Community Development Manager

Job description

**About the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM)** The Institute of Foundation Models is a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, deploying, and risk-managing large-scale AI systems. We drive innovation in foundation models and their operationalization, empowering research, education, and industry adoption through scalable infrastructure and real-world applications. **The Role** We are seeking a **Community Development Manager** to expand the reach and real-world adoption of our foundation models (language, vision, multimodal, and world models) beyond the university environment. This role bridges the gap between **research innovation** and **practical use**, ensuring our models are accessible, well-documented, and actively adopted by external developers, partners, and organizations. The ideal candidate combines technical comfort with strong communication and community-building skills to: ● promote the use of IFM technology, ● foster a vibrant developer and user ecosystem, and ● support adoption strategies. ### Key Responsibilities - **Community Development & Engagement** - Build and nurture a developer and user community around IFM's models, APIs, and tools. - Plan and run workshops, hackathons, webinars, and training sessions to showcase model capabilities and encourage experimentation and adoption. - Develop partnerships with industry, government, and academic collaborators to promote technology transfer and open innovation around IFM models. - Represent IFM at external events, conferences, and meetups, championing its models, tools, and initiatives. - Define and track key community metrics (e.g., active developers, event participation, usage coming from community channels) to understand impact and refine activities. - **Technology Adoption & Support** - Work closely with the **Product, Research, and Engineering** teams to understand model capabilities, deployment options, and priority use cases. - Translate complex research outputs into practical applications, example integrations, documentation, and user guides. - Provide technical onboarding and ongoing support to external developers and partners integrating IFM models and APIs. - Gather structured feedback from users and partners, and channel it into product and research roadmaps (e.g., feature requests, pain points, documentation gaps). - Coordinate with DevOps and MLOps teams to ensure external users have reliable access to IFM models (APIs, SDKs, sandbox environments) and know how to use them. - **Content & Knowledge Sharing** - Develop and maintain public-facing resources such as documentation, tutorials, FAQs, example repos, and quick-start guides. - Create and support content such as blog posts, talks, short videos, and demo showcases that explain “what this model can do” and “how to use it” for different audiences. - Support the creation of case studies and success stories that highlight impactful applications built on IFM models. - Contribute to communication materials for product updates, new releases, and adoption milestones, in coordination with Product and Communications teams. ### Qualifications & Experience - **Essential** - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in **Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering**, or a related field. - **3–6 years** of experience in developer relations, technical community building, technology adoption, or adjacent roles (e.g., product, solutions, startup founder/operator with strong external-facing responsibilities). - Comfortable writing small scripts and demo applications in **Python or JavaScript** to call APIs, build simple prototypes, and help developers integrate IFM models into their own applications. - Familiarity with how modern ML models are used in practice (e.g., calling hosted models via APIs, using SDKs, or working with ecosystems such as **Hugging Face**). - Experience working with **GitHub** or similar platforms (issues, pull requests, basic branching) and contributing to documentation and example repositories. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, accessible language for both technical and non-technical audiences. - Demonstrated ability to **plan, execute, and iterate** on community or developer-facing programs (events, workshops, hackathons, pilots) in a fast-moving environment. - Proven stakeholder management skills, working across multiple internal teams (research, product, engineering, communications) and external partners - **Preferred** - Experience working with common ML frameworks (e.g., **PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX**) or model deployment tools (e.g., **Docker, Kubernetes, major cloud platforms**). - Prior experience with **foundation models** (LLMs, multimodal models, or world models) and familiarity with AI/ML research environments. - Background in AI/ML, computer science, or a related technical field (formal degree or equivalent practical experience). - Experience in an academic, research lab, or “frontier-tech” environment where research-to-product translation is part of the work.