Community Development Manager

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