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The Thunderbird project is hiring: Software Engineers

8 responses

We’re Hiring Again!

You read that right, we are hiring “Software Engineers”, plural. We have some big plans for the next year and you can be a part of it!

You can find the job post below. If you are interested Email your CV/Resume and cover letter to: apply@mozillafoundation.org.

About Thunderbird

Thunderbird is an email client depended on daily by 25 million people on three platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux (and other *nix). It was developed under the Mozilla Corporation until 2014 when the project was handed over to the community.

The Thunderbird project is lead by the Thunderbird Council, a group of volunteers from the community who has a strong interest in moving Thunderbird forward. With the help of the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird employs about a handful of staff, and is now hiring additional developers to support the volunteer community in making Thunderbird shine.

You will join the team that is leading Thunderbird into a bright future. We are working on increasing the use of web technologies and decreasing dependencies on the internals of the Mozilla platform, to ensure independence and easier maintenance.

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 Contract

We need your help to improve and maintain Thunderbird. Moving Thunderbird forward includes replacing/rewriting components to be based primarily on web technologies, reducing the reliance on Mozilla-internal interfaces. It also includes boosting the user experience of the product.

Maintenance involves fixing bugs and regressions, as well as addressing technical debt and enhancing performance. Most tasks have a component of both maintenance and improvement, and any new component needs careful integration with the existing system.

We have compiled a high level list of tasks here; the work assigned to you will include a subset of these items. Let us know in your cover letter where you believe you can make most impact and how.

You will work with community volunteers and other employees around the globe to advance the Thunderbird product and mission of open and secure communications.

This is a remote, hourly 6-month contract with a possibility to extend. Hours will be up to 40 per week.

Your Professional Profile

Since we are looking to fill a few positions, we are interested to hear from both junior and senior candidates who can offer the following:

You should be a self-starter. In a large code-base it’s inevitable that you conduct your own research, investigation and debugging, although others in the project will of course share their knowledge.

We expect you to have excellent communication skills and coordinate your work over email, IRC, and Bugzilla as well as video conferencing.

Next Steps

If this position sounds like a good fit for you, please send us your resume and cover letter to apply@mozillafoundation.org.

A cover letter is essential to your application, as we want to know how you’d envision your contributions to the team. Tell us about why you’re passionate about Thunderbird and this position. Also include samples of your work as a programmer, either directly or a link. If you contribute to any open source software, or maintain a blog we’d love to hear about it.

You will be hired as an independent contractor through the Upwork service as a client to the Mozilla Foundation. The Thunderbird Project is separate from the Mozilla Foundation, but the Foundation acts as the project’s fiscal and legal home.

By applying for this job, you are agreeing to have your applications reviewed by Thunderbird contractors and volunteers who are a part of the hiring committee as well as by staff members of the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla is an equal opportunity employer. Mozilla and the Thunderbird Project value diversity and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

8 responses

Ken Wood wrote on

Can you make it a priority to create a wizard that imports everything from everything? ie: Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Contacts, Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Evolution, whatever crap Mac users are using…

Ryan Sipes wrote on

Hopefully as we add more people to the team we can do a bunch of improvements in setup and in regards to the user experience altogether. One of the best ways to get this on our map is to report it as an Enhancement bug on bugzilla. To open one for Thunderbird go to this page and mark the severity as “Enhancement”: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbird

Applicant wrote on

How many applications do you expect to receive? i.e the position looks exciting but given the visibility of Mozilla I’d expect millions of applications so what are my real chancescto grt my application considered?

Ryan Sipes wrote on

We generally don’t get near as many as that. Actually, we have gotten relatively few in the past. So I encourage anyone to apply!

Liz French wrote on

Re: Attachment position.
I love all the new update, logo especially but the placement of the Attachment paperclip is not good. I appreciate that it is above the attachment pane and looks neat on paper but as someone who sends heaps of emails with attachments – the extra “where is it” and extra hand movement ….all…the…way over to the right hand side of the email pane is not great for intensive work and wrist action. Tendonitis is a serious thing for a computer user and unnecessary wrist actions should always be avoided.
Can I please swap the attachment icon with the save icon because with me its all write attach and send. I dont save.
Kind regards
Liz French

Bernt wrote on

What exactly do you mean by web technologies? Are Thunderbird moving towards becoming a Electron app? If so, that would be a enormous step backwards. Please elaborate.

Ryan Sipes wrote on

No, we will continue to use the same toolkit that enables a great, native Thunderbird experience. The implementation of web technologies has been in the works for a while, rewriting various old libraries in Javascript. But that isn’t anything to be worried about, it’s just done that way when it makes sense. (there’s also extensive rust and C++ in use)

Bernt wrote on

That sounds great, more rust please! 😉 Btw it would be cool if Thunderbird were able to extract ticket/travel/etc information in a privacy respecting way. There’s a project called KDE Itinerary that tries to fill this missing piece for KMail, maybe it would be worth investigate if any of it would make sense for the future of Thunderbird as well.

https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2018/08/19/kde-itinerary-introduction.html

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