Red Hat is hiring for a new Fedora role
Red Hat is hiring for a new full-time role supporting the Fedora Project. The job listing (replicated below) is open now, and if you are interested, you can apply online.
About the job
Red Hat’s Linux Integration Team is looking for a Fedora Operations Architect. In this new role, you will work as a member of the Fedora Council, the project’s top-level governance and leadership body, to coordinate and execute key strategic initiatives. You will also work with internal and external stakeholders and the community-elected Fedora Engineering Steering Committee to guide technical changes in the Fedora Linux distribution and coordinate with RHEL engineers and product managers on the impact of these changes. As Fedora Operations Architect, you will analyze Fedora processes and programs for measurable impact, and develop new practices to reduce complexity and improve outcomes in making open source innovation available to Fedora users and to Fedora’s downstream distributions. Successful applicants for this remote-flexible role must reside in a state or country where Red Hat is registered to do business.
What you will do
- As a member of the Fedora Council, work with other Council members and the community to advance strategic initiatives
- Use communication and coordination skills to drive an effective Change process in Fedora that avoids or mitigates surprises, and delivers desirable, innovative results into Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Maintain Fedora release cadence so that it aligns with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux needs
- Evaluate and improve technical and social processes across the project
- Provide status reports and communications to the Fedora Community
- Participate in relevant community teams as an ongoing stakeholder
What you will bring
- Extensive experience with the Fedora Project or a comparable open source community
- Experience with software development and open source developer communities; understanding of development processes
- Demonstrated ability in organizing complex projects with multiple interests and diverse stakeholders
- Ability to lead teams through empathy, inspiration, and persuasion with multiple cross-organizational groups that span the globe
- Outstanding organizational skills; ability to prioritize tasks matching short and long-term goals and focus on the tasks of high priority
- Experience motivating and respecting capacity-limited volunteers and associates across teams and companies
- Exceptional English language communication abilities in both written and verbal forms
Obvious question: What’s the difference between this new FOA thing and the old FPgM?
The intention is to cover some of the same space, but with more explicit focus on change management and on process and less on schedule and status reporting. In some ways, there was always a mismatch between what the role means to Fedora and some aspects of (or approaches to) program management at Red Hat. While it certainly wouldn’t have been my choice to do it this way, this gives us a chance to address that.
Also, from a practical standpoint, instead of reporting into Red Hat’s distinct Program Management organization, it will report into the Linux organization — to me, in fact.
@mattdm I believe this would be open to folks in Colorado since Red Hat has an office there, but I don’t see the salary range posted; it’s a Colorado state law that the salary range has to be included in job listings (Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, Part 2: https://cdle.colorado.gov/equalpaytransparency).
I’d like to send this to some folks in Colorado but I know that would be the first question raised.
Is that something that can be added to the listing?
You may be overestimating the amount of time I spent on “schedule and status reporting”.
For what it’s worth, my 5 years in the role looked very little like what my colleagues working on RHEL did.
Yes, that’s what I mean — this should have more explicit alignment between the actual job and the nominal position.
Did some volunteers show up yet?
I wonder if it is possible to decentralize this stuff?
Where is the list of strategic initiatives?
Do initiatives has a (GitLab) tracker deployed? (one for all, or one for each)
What Changes are required?
What goes wrong?
What are the needs?
Not sure if this stuff is actionable. Like these processes - are they documented anywhere? The first thing this architect should do is to draw a lot of diagrams. Right now even the packaging process doesn’t have a diagram with all these koji/shmoji and friends. No transparency in mirror state and sync. No transparency into community health. Funding. Etc. A lot of diagrams.