Open-Source Community Manager

Chayn CIO; City Of London; Remote; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Part time

Job summary

A nonprofit organization is seeking an Open-Source Community Manager to lead their community on GitHub. The role includes managing repositories, fostering contributions, and creating technical documentation. Ideal candidates should have a strong background in software development and open-source practices, along with excellent communication skills. This contract is flexible, fixed-term for 6 months, and open to remote work.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Access to therapy sessions

Wellbeing support

Qualifications

• Strong technical background with experience in software development.
• Experience with Git, GitHub, and open-source development workflows.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and moderate GitHub repositories.
• Create and maintain documentation for new contributors.
• Support community contributions and engagement.

Skills

Community building

Communication

Technical writing

Open-source development practices

Software development

Tools

GitHub

Typescript

React

Node

Job description

Salary: £190–250 per day depending on experience • Application Deadline: 31 October 2025

We’re looking for an Open-Source Community Manager to champion our open-source community as part of our commitment to working in the open, sharing our knowledge, and learning with survivors and practitioners around the world. You’ll be working alongside our engineering team to maintain and grow our open-source ecosystem on GitHub, and support our contributors there.

About Chayn

Chayn is a global nonprofit making healing accessible for all survivors of gender-based violence. By reimagining technology, we create online resources that are trauma-informed, multilingual, and feminist, supporting survivors to heal at their own pace, wherever they are.

Chayn started in 2013 to provide survivors of abuse with accurate, diverse and accessible information. Since our beginnings, over 700,000 people have accessed our award-winning work online, generating 1.2 million page views. Up to 70% of our volunteers are survivors of abuse, which means not only are our projects user-centred; they are user-led.

We are experts in trauma-informed work, and have developed trauma-informed design principles that we apply at every level of the organisation, from HR to user research and UX/UI. We are one of only a few feminist technology organisations tackling gender-based violence while creating and maintaining openly-licensed products and code.

While we’ve been going for over 10 years, Chayn was entirely volunteer-led until 2020 when we started to grow our team of paid staff. We are now a core team of 11, with up to 10 supporting contractors and a team of contributing volunteers, working together remotely from all over the world.

Role description

This role will focus on building our open-source developer community and maintaining our public repositories.

Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:

Open-source community management

• Maintain and moderate our GitHub repositories, ensuring they follow best practices for open-source projects
• Review, triage, and respond to issues and pull requests from community contributors
• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation, contributing guidelines, and onboarding materials for new contributors
• Collaborate with our engineering team to identify opportunities for open-source contributions and improvements
• Foster an inclusive and welcoming community environment that aligns with Chayn’s values
• Support volunteer developers and contributors with technical guidance and project coordination

Technical contributions

• Merge dependency updates
• Contribute code to our open-source projects, including bug fixes, new features, and improvements
• Support the technical aspects of our open-source initiatives, including CI/CD pipelines and automated testing
• Work with our engineering team to ensure our projects are accessible, well-documented, and contributor-friendly
• Help maintain our technical roadmaps and coordinate community contributions with internal development priorities

Content and communications

• Develop technical documentation, API references, and developer guides
• Create video tutorials for the developer community

Your biggest challenge to solve

Chayn is deeply committed to open-source as a core value, but our small engineering team is stretched thin maintaining our platform products that directly serve survivors. Your primary challenge will be to establish and lead an open-source workstream (independent to core engineering work) that thrives with minimal engineering team involvement.

This means building sustainable community processes, clear contribution pathways, and robust documentation that allows external contributors to meaningfully engage with our projects without requiring constant technical oversight from our core engineers. You’ll need to balance maintaining code quality and alignment with our mission, while empowering the community to drive feature development, bug fixes, and project evolution.

Success looks like a vibrant, self-sustaining open-source ecosystem where community contributions flow seamlessly into our products, our engineering team can focus on survivor-facing features, and new contributors can onboard and contribute effectively with your guidance rather than direct engineer support.

Your profile

We’re looking for someone who is passionate about both technology and social impact, with a strong understanding of open-source development practices and community-building. You should have excellent communication skills and be comfortable engaging with diverse technical audiences. Experience working with trauma-informed approaches or in social impact organisations would be valuable but is not essential.

You might have a background in software development, developer relations, technical writing, or community management. Perhaps you’ve been an active contributor to open-source projects or have experience building developer communities. Perhaps you’ve come from a traditional tech company looking to apply your skills in the social impact space, or from a nonprofit background with technical expertise.

If it’s of interest to you, there may be opportunities to collaborate closely with our engineering team and take on additional development responsibilities.

It’s important that all team members have an understanding of intersectionality and systems of oppression and an affinity with Chayn’s aims and organisational values which can be found here.

Essential

• Strong technical background with experience in software development.
• Experience in the following languages and frameworks
  • Typescript
  • React
  • Node
• Experience with Git, GitHub, and open-source development workflows
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with ability to explain technical concepts to diverse audiences
• Experience in community building, developer relations, or technical advocacy
• Passion for open-source software and collaborative development
• Understanding of software development best practices, including testing, documentation, and code review

Desirable

• Experience or exposure to trauma-informed care
• Understanding of the needs of survivors of domestic abuse, sexual assault and rape, and the ecosystem of support
• Understanding of mental health sector
• Experience of working within small, distributed teams
• Experience with DevOps practices and tools (CI/CD, Docker, cloud platforms)
• Background in technical writing or documentation
• Experience in Ruby on Rails

*Please Note: This position may be combined with our Tech Coordinator role for candidates interested in both open-source software development and technical operations. Please mention this in your application if relevant.

Our products

Online resource examples

• 🌺 Bloom: A remote trauma support service, offering video courses and reflective webchat that combine the insights of survivors globally with therapeutic practices to support survivors in healing from trauma. We currently have partnerships with Bumble and Badoo where we offer their users bespoke Bloom programmes of support.
• 🛠️ Survivor AI: Our AI-powered tool that helps those who have had content shared without their consent to create effective takedown request letters.
• 📖 Manipulation is abuse: A guide for survivors and allies, to help identify manipulative relationships and situations, and offer suggestions on ways to deal with them.
• 📖 DIY Online Safety guide: A practical guide supporting survivors of digital abuse, focusing on five of the most common types—scams, online harassment, image-based abuse, nonconsensual location-tracking, and unauthorised account access.

Research and thought leadership

• 📖 Orbits: A guide on how we can design interventions to tech abuse that are intersectional, survivor-centred, and trauma-informed. Co-created with thinkers, practitioners, and survivors from around the world, the guide focuses on three areas that are vital for effectively tackling tech abuse: technology, research, and policy. It explores how systems are failing survivors and how we can advance a different approach that leaves no survivor behind.
• 📖 Trauma-informed design: One of the many write-ups of our design principles and the accompanying white paper.

Resources and services for organisations

• 🌺 Bloom for Bumble and Badoo service is an industry-first partnership where we provide a customised version of our remote trauma support service Bloom for the Bumble and Badoo community.
• 🪔 Diya is our bespoke vicarious trauma training for organisations and their teams, geared towards humanitarian workers, frontline gender-based violence groups, customer support staff and content moderators.

Changing media narratives

Our CEO, Hera Hussein, is a media spokesperson and regularly talks to broadcast and print media about stories connected with gender-based violence and online safety. You can see some examples here: LBC, BBC News, HuffPo, BBC, Vice and Forbes.

The position

Inclusion

At Chayn, inclusion and accessibility are at the core of our work. We welcome applicants from all walks of life. Given the nature of our courses and our audience, we encourage applications from those who grew up in the Global South (or Majority World).

We also encourage applications from people of colour, LGBTQ+ people (we are a trans-inclusive organisation), people with disabilities, and people who have experienced other exclusion or marginalisation. Up to 70% of our team members are survivors of abuse so if you are thinking to apply, know that you will be in a safe and affirming space.

We have tried to make this recruitment process as accessible as possible, but know that there might be more that we can do, particularly if you have experienced exclusion, disadvantage or discrimination, or if you have particular accessibility needs. We would be happy to provide any further support that you may require—please get in touch with us and send us an email and we can think together about how to make this process easier for you.

Hours

This contract will fixed-term freelance for 6 months, with a strong possibility for extension.

• You will work 1 day per week, to a total of 7.5 hours
• You’ll have flexibility over your hours to work them as you like over the course of the week, either as one full day or split
• If you are interested, and opportunities become available to work more closely with our core engineering team, we work Mon–Thu with collaborative hours of 2–6pm UK time, as this overlaps with our team based in North and South America and South Asia.

We take the wellbeing of our team very seriously so part of the interview process will be to discuss ideas for managing this well.

We’re happy to welcome people to become part of our team as a freelance contractor (based anywhere) or as an employee on a PAYE basis, for which you must be based in the UK and have a valid work permit. We are unable to sponsor visas.

Chayn is a fully remote organisation.

Our offer

This work will be undertaken on a freelance basis, so you can be based anywhere in the world. We are unable to sponsor visas.

In addition to compensation, Chayn offers:

• Flexible working hours and adaptations for mental health and menstrual leave
• Access to therapy sessions and wellbeing support

Process

To apply, please send the following to our email with Open Source Community Manager in the subject line.

Please read What it’s like to work at Chayn and give it some thought before applying to work with us.

Then attach :

• CV
• A video (3 minutes max) outlining why you are interested in this role and your experience with open-source communities
• Links to your GitHub profile, technical blog, or examples of your community work (if available)
• You are welcome to include your pronouns and the pronunciation of your name if you’d like

*Please note that due to the high number of applications we receive and our small team size, we will only consider applications that include a video. If you really feel you can\'t send us a video then please explain why in your application.

Recruitment stages

• Stage 0: Shortlisting based on CV and video
• Stage 1: 30-minute informal chat with Lead Engineer
• Stage 2: 60-minute task-based interview (20-minute task + 40 minute interview including questions which will be sent in advance)
• Stage 3: Follow-up questions via email, if applicable

Recruitment will be subject to receipt of references and other checks when necessary.