---
title: '(TSeer) Community Development Manager at Institute of Foundation Models'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/tseer-community-development-manager-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-d46ars2bfceh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# (TSeer) Community Development Manager at Institute of Foundation Models

- **Company:** Institute of Foundation Models
- **Location:** Sunnyvale, CA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$350k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-02-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/ifm-us/37c03939-7aaf-48ca-8831-401f39d5b420

## Job description

## About the Institute of Foundation Models

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.

Academic Qualifications

- 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.

## About Institute of Foundation Models

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) is a global AI research lab dedicated to the open and independent development of frontier-class foundation models, operating under the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).
- **Entity Type**: Academic Research Institute (part of MBZUAI, a university)
- **Headquarters**: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (with labs in Sunnyvale, CA, USA and Paris, France)
- **Founded**: 2026 (launched with Silicon Valley lab)
- **Founders**: Part of MBZUAI, led by President Eric Xing

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence research, foundation model development, open-source AI
- **Target customers**: Researchers, academia, industry partners, and the global AI community (B2B/Research/Public sector)
- **Mission**: To produce the world’s leading models across modalities while ensuring responsible, open, and socially meaningful impact.

## Products & Services
For each major offering:
- **JAIS Series**: State-of-the-art open-source Arabic LLM covering Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, including Moroccan Arabic (Darija). Fully documented training lifecycle.
- **Vicuna**: Lightweight open chatbot surpassing 90% of ChatGPT and Bard quality.
- **K2 (K2-65B)**: Large language model with advanced reasoning capabilities, focusing on sustainable performance. Updated version soon to be released.
- **PAN World Model**: Next-gen foundation model for embodied reasoning and physical-world simulation, integrating multimodal inputs (language, video, spatial data, physical actions). Includes PAN-Agent for multimodal reasoning tasks.
- **FM For Bio – GET**: Domain-specific model for biology.
- **LLM360**: Open-source framework enhancing transparency and collaboration in LLM research, providing training code, datasets, and model checkpoints.
- **Research partnerships**: Collaboration with academia, startups, and enterprises via shared compute, co-publishing, and co-development.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (non-commercial research institute)
- **Key Metric**: Funded by MBZUAI; specific budget not publicly disclosed. Notable open-source model releases (JAIS, Vicuna, K2, PAN).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: MBZUAI, with international advisory boards and peer review processes. Partnerships with industry leaders, academic institutions, and public organizations.
- **Growth Signals**: Launch of Silicon Valley lab in Sunnyvale, CA (2026); expansion into Paris and Abu Dhabi nodes; active hiring for research interns, distributed ML engineers, HPC engineers; release of flagship models (PAN, K2 update).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Openness & transparency**: Full release of training code, datasets, and model checkpoints through LLM360 – one of the most transparent approaches in AI.
- **Global research network**: Three hubs (Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley, Paris) combining academic rigor with startup agility.
- **Access to large-scale compute**: High-performance computing infrastructure for training frontier models.
- **Multilingual & cultural focus**: JAIS addresses underrepresentation of Arabic and other languages, preserving cultural authenticity.
- **World model innovation**: PAN differentiates from text-only models by predicting comprehensive world states for advanced reasoning and simulation.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building open, powerful foundation models across language, vision, multimodal, and domain-specific systems.
- Expand global collaboration and talent acquisition, especially in Silicon Valley.
- Advance responsible AI with safety systems and international advisory boards.
- Drive real-world impact through partnerships in scientific discovery, human-AI interaction, and public good.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Collaborative, cutting-edge academic research environment with a mission to open-source AI for global benefit. Teams span Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Silicon Valley.
- **Remote/hybrid/office**: All listed roles are **on-site** (Sunnyvale, CA or Abu Dhabi). No remote policy indicated.
- **Notable perks**: Work with world-class researchers, access to large-scale compute, opportunity to publish and contribute to open-source models. The institute combines the agility of a startup with the resources of an established university.
- **Current openings**: AI Research Internship (LLM), Distributed Machine Learning Engineer, Eval360 Error Analysis Engineer, High Performance Computing Software Engineer (Supercomputing) – all on-site in Sunnyvale or Abu Dhabi.

## Sources
1. [ifm.ai](https://ifm.ai/)
2. [ifm.ai/about](https://ifm.ai/about/)
3. [jobs.lever.co/ifm-us](https://jobs.lever.co/ifm-us)
4. [LinkedIn – Institute of Foundation Models](https://www.linkedin.com/company/institute-of-foundation-models)
5. [MBZUAI News – Launch of IFM and Silicon Valley Lab](https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/mbzuai-launches-institute-of-foundation-models-and-establishes-silicon-valley-ai-lab/)

## Other roles at Institute of Foundation Models

- [Research Scientist – World Modeling, Data](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-world-modeling-data-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-bch8rt52tddk) — Sunnyvale, CA
- [Community Development Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/community-development-manager-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-1ns2xzrzec79) — Sunnyvale, CA
- [Social Media Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-manager-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-nppzja97rfm9) — Sunnyvale, CA
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- [Senior Communications Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-communications-consultant-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-q3waewdeghjx) — Sunnyvale, CA
- [Admin Operations Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/admin-operations-coordinator-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-299qtkyk8h27) — Sunnyvale, CA
- [Inference Optimization Intern – Performance Modeling](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-optimization-intern-performance-modeling-institute-of-foundation-6dp7c44ge7e3) — Sunnyvale, CA
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- [AI Research Internship - WM](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-internship-wm-institute-of-foundation-models-sunnyvale-59229gv1vw1g) — Sunnyvale, CA
- [Research Scientist, Agentic Data & Benchmarking](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-agentic-data-benchmarking-institute-of-foundation-models-knfx9e7pzxej) — Sunnyvale, CA