Community Development Manager - Foundation Models

About the role

The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) is a research lab building, understanding, deploying and risk-managing large-scale AI systems. It is looking for a Community Development Manager in Abu Dhabi to expand the reach and real-world adoption of its foundation models (language, vision, multimodal and world models) beyond the university environment. The role bridges research innovation and practical use, making the models accessible, well documented and actively adopted by external developers, partners and organisations.

Key responsibilities

• Build and nurture a developer and user community around IFM's models, APIs and tools, and define and track community metrics.
• Plan and run workshops, hackathons, webinars and training sessions, and develop partnerships with industry, government and academia.
• Represent IFM at external events, conferences and meetups.
• Translate research outputs into practical applications, examples, documentation and user guides, and provide onboarding and support to external developers.
• Gather user feedback and channel it into product and research roadmaps.
• Coordinate with DevOps and MLOps teams so external users have reliable access to models, APIs, SDKs and sandbox environments.
• Create documentation, tutorials, FAQs, example repos and quick-start guides, plus blogs, talks, videos and case studies.

Required profile

• 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.
• Ability to write small scripts and demo applications in Python or JavaScript to call APIs and build prototypes.
• Familiarity with how modern ML models are used in practice (calling hosted models via APIs, SDKs, ecosystems such as Hugging Face).
• Experience with GitHub or similar platforms and contributing to documentation and example repositories.
• Strong communication skills, translating complex technical concepts clearly for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proven ability to plan and run community programmes and stakeholder management across research, product, engineering and communications teams.

Preferred

• Experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) or deployment tools (Docker, Kubernetes, major cloud platforms).
• Prior experience with foundation models (LLMs, multimodal or world models) and AI/ML research environments.
• Background in AI/ML, computer science or a related technical field.
• Experience in an academic, research lab or frontier-tech environment.