Sovereign Tech Fellowship

Open source experts — including maintainers, community managers, and technical writers — often take on work that is hard to quantify, spread across multiple projects, and performed behind the scenes. This includes reviewing changes, triaging security issues, coordinating communities, and documenting processes. Without professional support for these roles, essential technologies risk instability, progress slows, and the workload falls on too few people, increasing stress and burnout. By providing flexible, targeted support, the Sovereign Tech Fellowship enables these experts to focus on impactful work, strengthens the ecosystem for everyone, and builds the foundations that allow the next generation of contributors and maintainers to engage, learn, and thrive.

Starting May 1, 2026, we will hire up to twelve Sovereign Tech Fellows, either as freelance contractors or as employees at Sovereign Tech Agency GmbH.

The length of the contract for freelance positions is flexible, ranging from 3 to 12 months, with flexible weekly working hours from 6 to 32 hours. The hourly rate will be negotiated during the selection process and will be based on market rates, qualifications, and experience.

For the employment positions, we are planning a small team of up to three positions at Sovereign Tech Agency GmbH, each one for two years. The weekly working hours will be between 20 and 40 hours, as determined by the Sovereign Tech Fellow. Compensation is based on the collective agreement for the public sector in Germany (TVöD-Bund) and will range from €64,000 to €82,000 per year for a full-time position, including 30 days of vacation, depending on qualifications and experience.

Apply here:

Apply as a freelancer

Apply for employment

• Submission deadline for applications is on April 6, 2026, at 11:59 PM (CET).
• We will invite selected candidates for video interviews starting April 20, 2026.
• Final decisions and offers will be communicated by the end of April 2026.
• Freelance and employment contracts begin from May 1, 2026, depending on availability

Submission via platform: Applications must be submitted via the online application portal. No supplemental materials should be sent via email or any other form of communication at this time.

Completeness: Applications must be completed in English. The questions must be answered to a degree that allows us to assess and evaluate the applications.

Open source: All code and documentation to be supported must be licensed in a way that allows free reuse, modification, and redistribution. OSI-approved or FSF Free/Libre licenses are acceptable for code. Creative-Commons-like licenses for documentation must not include Non-Commercial or No-Derivatives clauses.

Your role:

• Maintainer: You must be a maintainer of or contributor to at least three FOSS projects. For at least one of these projects, you must serve as a maintainer. We define a maintainer as someone with permission to merge pull requests into the project’s repositories or to publish a release.
• Community Manager: You must be a community manager for at least one FOSS project, and your work there must be verifiable for us (e.g., through visible activity in forums, blogs, mailing lists, issues, or conferences/events).
• Technical Writer: You have made visible and verifiable contributions to the documentation of at least three technical projects or components. Ideally, you have a clear plan for which open source projects you intend to support with your work and have coordinated this in advance with the project maintainers.

The projects you maintain or contribute to are technologies that meet the criteria of prevalence, relevance, vulnerability, public interest, and expertise (see below).

One application: You may submit only one application to the Sovereign Tech Fellowship program. The following requirements must be met:

For the freelance contractor option:

• You are not otherwise being paid for the same work for the duration of the fellowship
• You are not applying on behalf of an organization seeking funding for maintainers it employs. Please consider submitting a proposal to the Sovereign Tech Fund instead.

For the employment option:

• You are located within Germany
• You are authorized to work in Germany and can legally sign a work contract

Language: You have a strong command of written and spoken English and can communicate complex or technical topics clearly. German is not required for the fellowship.

Sustainability: You want to use the fellowship to make the projects you work on more sustainable for the future. This includes not only technical measures, such as refactoring to reduce technical debt, but also mentoring, onboarding new contributors, and any activities that support these efforts.

Active engagement: You are willing to participate in conferences, events, and communication activities of the Sovereign Tech Agency. This may include interviews and involvement in evaluation reporting. Full-time fellows are expected to contribute their expertise in consulting manner to the work of the Sovereign Tech Agency, for instance by supporting the design of new programs. All fellows will be part of a Sovereign Tech Agency maintainers community, which we will build together.

If all of the above requirements are met, we evaluate the following criteria:

Expertise: Your application demonstrates that you possess both personal and professional expertise

Sustainability: The proposed activities during the fellowship are suitable for making the projects more sustainable. We assess how the planned measures will strengthen projects in the long term, particularly through attracting new contributors and providing mentoring. Your cover letter is a good opportunity to briefly present your ideas for possible activities.

Criticality: Your projects meet the criteria of a foundational open source technology:

• Prevalence: A technology is prevalent when it is widely used for or within other technologies.
• Relevance: A technology is relevant if it is significant for one or more important societal sectors, e.g., education, health care, energy sector, industry.
• Vulnerability: A technology is vulnerable if important work – to keep the quality of the project or to enhance it – is not (sufficiently) funded by other actors or cannot be completed for other structural reasons.
• Public Interest: There are benefits for society or critical sectors of society (e.g., education, health care, energy, industry) by funding the technology.

We will establish a mentoring program for the Sovereign Tech Fellows, in which we develop concrete opportunities for your professional development and collaborative learning. Participation is voluntary and will be tailored to your needs.

With the continuation of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship, we will regularly recruit new Sovereign Tech Fellows after the initial application phase in March 2026, in order to develop open source ecosystems into healthy and resilient systems on a lasting and sustainable basis. This will create ongoing opportunities to become part of the program in the future. We will announce the specific details on our social media channels and in our newsletter.

We have collected the answers to frequently asked questions on the page linked below:

Sovereign Tech Fellowship FAQ page