Build Engineer

Overview

Thunderbird is a email client depended on daily by 25 million people. It was developed under the Mozilla Corporation until 2014 when development was handed over to the community. The Thunderbird Council, who leads the community effort, has begun hiring contractors in support of this venture.

You will join the team that is leading Thunderbird into a bright future. As a build engineer you will be serving the community, empowering them to make their contributions available to over 25 million people.

The Thunderbird team works openly using public bug trackers and repositories, providing you with a premier chance to show your work to the world.

About the Position

The Mozilla Thunderbird project is looking to hire a build and release engineer to help maintain Thunderbird. You’ll be expected to work with community volunteers, the Thunderbird Council, and other employees to maintain and improve the Thunderbird build and release process.

This is a full-time, remote 3-month contract position (with the possibility of continuing). You will be expected to have excellent written communication skills and coordinate your work over email, IRC, and Bugzilla.

As a build & release engineer for Thunderbird you will…

• Maintain and improve the Thunderbird build system to ensure that both nightly builds and releases are always possible.
• Set up and maintain a continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) service for Thunderbird.
• Procure and maintain build infrastructure in tandem with Thunderbird’s infrastructure engineer (who is currently focused on web-based services).
• Work with both volunteers and employees across the world to fix build issues.
• Follow improvements made by Mozilla engineers for the Firefox build & release process and implement those for Thunderbird.
• Collaborate with QA, Security, Localization, and Engineering for coordinated code releases for “release” builds (known as ESR) and beta builds.

Your Previous Experience

• Have experience using build systems (preferably make).
• Have experience setting up a continuous integration service.
• Have solid scripting knowledge (shell, Python).
• Have experience using distributed version control systems (preferably Mercurial, Git would be acceptable).
• Some development background with Python and C is highly preferred.
• Experience building and releasing cross-platform applications is a plus.
• B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is preferred.

Next Steps

If this position sounds like a good fit for you please send us your resume with a cover letter. Tell us about why you’re passionate about Thunderbird and this position. If you contribute to any open source software, or maintain a blog we’d love to hear about it.