Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Tech Lead

About OpenMined

OpenMined is a 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation that brings together leading minds in AI, security, and privacy technology to develop open-source solutions that transform how data can be accessed and shared. Founded in 2017, we've grown into a global community of over 18,000 members working to ensure that privacy protection and AI innovation reinforce each other rather than undermine one another. We are driven by a simple challenge: the most valuable data for solving humanity's greatest challenges remains locked away due to privacy concerns, and we can change that through technology rather than compromise.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior / Staff Software Engineer to join OpenMined, a nonprofit building open-source infrastructure for federated AI.

You’ll lead our 😱 ScreamingFace squad, the team that makes this vision real by building the internet's first leaderboard for fusion models (ensembles) and the open toolkit supporting benchmark evaluations for fusion models. Today, claims that the newest solo LLM beats the others are everywhere, and almost none of them can be checked or compared with the performance achieved by combining LLMs into more powerful fusion models. Results are self-reported, expensive to rerun, and hard to pick apart. We think there’s a better standard: every fusion and benchmark run compiles to a single line of text that anyone can replay for almost nothing, and a score counts only once someone else can reproduce it. The ScreamingFace toolkit is the open-source Python library and engine, leveraging our URL4 protocol, to let any researcher (a frontier lab, a university group, an independent builder) compose ensembles and routers across open and closed models, using their own keys, and grade them against pinned benchmarks. The ScreamingFace leaderboard is the public map of the quality–cost frontier, backed by a shared cache that makes every result on it cheap to verify and easy to build on.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You understand the long term vision. You write code. You make architecture decisions. You set engineering standards by example. You're the most experienced engineer on the squad, the person others look to for production-quality judgment, and the voice that connects this team's decisions with the organization's broader platform strategy.

The squad is talented and mission-driven and looking to strengthen its ability to continuously ship production software. You bring this production muscle: the instinct for what scales, the judgment about what to build and what to kill, and the craft to raise the team's standard through code review, pairing, and architectural guidance rather than mandates.

If you're motivated by building distributed systems that matter, mentoring brilliant people who are just getting started, and making hard technical calls in a fast-moving nonprofit that's trying to change how the world shares data — we'd love to hear from you.

You'll work most closely with Kevin McDonough, Head of Engineering.

This is an independent contractor engagement, roughly a full-time commitment, with an initial 12-month term we expect to renew. You set your own schedule, but we need your working hours to overlap substantially with US Eastern business hours (your local time between one hour behind and two hours ahead of ET).

Responsibilities

• Own the ScreamingFace squad technical architecture end to end — align design, engineering, and deployment across the stack to deliver reliable technical capabilities and user experience from current implementation through product roadmap evolution.
• Drive production readiness through deployment monitoring, error handling, graceful degradation, and operational runbooks.
• Be a force multiplier by establishing, demonstrating, and mentoring the team to establish norms around engineering best practices (including system design for modularity, security, reliability, & scalability), code quality, and delivery to production.
• Collaborate on core technology stack strategy through architectural review and identification of components that should become shared organizational primitives and defining standard interfaces that prevent tight coupling.
• Partner with product lead to develop and execute on realistic roadmaps that balance what is desired with what is feasible, scalable, and architecturally sound.
• Own the delivery of engineering’s quarterly goals, ensuring consistent, high-impact delivery while effectively managing resources.
• Own team output, delivery, and success (productivity, timeliness, morale) through appropriately matching team members and work to properly balance interest, learning opportunities, capacity, and capability.
• Champion high-quality software delivery through the establishment of robust tools, processes, & methodologies, and by providing hands-on technical leadership via individual development contributions and code reviews.
• Create technical documentation and processes that support high velocity and knowledge transfer.

Requirements

Must-Haves

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of personally building, shipping, and operating production systems at meaningful scale
• Hands-on experience building production software with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) and helping a team manage their agentic workflows
• Strong Python (3.12+) proficiency — FastAPI services, async orchestration of concurrent model calls, typed SDK design and packaging, and a working comfort with parsers, ASTs, and DAG execution
• Distributed systems and API design experience including design & evolution of interfaces consumed by multiple independent teams
• Technical leadership experience: has introduced engineering quality practices (code review, testing, CI/CD) to one or more teams and mentored or managed at least 2 engineers (direct reports not required)
• Comfort with ambiguity and resource constraints
• Commitment, accountability, ownership — this isn’t just a job, the release gets shipped and outages get restored
• Async-fluent with strong written communication and capacity to build high-trust working relationships across 6hr+ time zone spread
• Cross-functional collaboration & communication to facilitate and improve understanding/context sharing between engineers and non-engineering/non-technical stakeholders

Preferred

• Practical RAG and information retrieval experience with vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation
• Vue 3 / TypeScript, Rust / Tauri, or cross-platform desktop app experience extremely beneficial
• Networking/P2P application experience beneficial

Compensation

• Contract fee: $77,000 - $128,000 USD annualized, invoiced monthly.
• Actual offers will be determined based on the candidate's skills, level of experience, and location.

Benefits

• Mission-Driven Work: Be part of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, focused on social impact rather than profit, offering the chance to make a meaningful difference in the world.
• Open Source Contribution: Make a real impact by contributing to an Open Source project that benefits a broad community.
• Collaborative Global Team: Join a dynamic, international team that values collaboration and diversity.
• Flexible Work Hours: Enjoy the autonomy to structure your work hours around what best fits your life and productivity.
• Fully Remote Work: Work remotely within the location requirements for this role.