jobs

Are you a software engineer passionate about internet freedom and transparency? The Tor Project is hiring a full-time developer to work on OONI!

What’s OONI?

The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is a free software effort of the Tor Project which aims to detect online censorship and traffic manipulation around the world through the collection of network measurements.

OONI is based on free software tests that are designed to measure:

• Blocking of websites
• Systems responsible for censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation
• Reachability of Tor, proxies, VPNs, and other systems

Since 2012, OONI has collected more than 9.5 million measurements across 96 countries, all of which are public and provide evidence and data to back up claims of network manipulation.

Why join OONI?

OONI is in a unique position to bring transparency to technical censorship. You can play a key part in keeping the web free and neutral.

By joining the team, you will play an important role not only in paving the road for a better interference detection system, but you will also be responsible for software run by activists around the world. Your work will help reveal unlawful censorship and surveillance around the world and aid the work of human rights defenders.

Becoming an OONI-tarian

As a core OONI developer, you will contribute to some of our active development efforts, including:

• Supporting advocacy groups in remotely controlling measurements from all the OONI probes they operate
• Re-engineering OONI’s data processing pipeline to allow for easier analysis
• Improving ooni-probe
• Improving ooni-backend

These tasks will increase the impact of the millions of measurements that OONI is currently hosting, the hundreds of vantage points around the world, and the future of censorship measurement.

Learn more and apply to join the OONI team as a core developer here.

I am honored to be joining the Tor Project today as the new Executive Director. I've been a big fan of Tor for a long time—ever since I met founders Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson in 2004 and learned about the important work they were doing to provide anonymity for online communications. Today Tor is an essential part of the Internet freedom infrastructure. Activists around the world depend on Tor, as do whistleblowers, victims of domestic violence, and regular citizens who care about their privacy.

This incredible team of people has built an amazing organization. I hope to help grow the Tor Project by building a more sustainable infrastructure and a more robust funding base, as well as by achieving greater adoption of Tor products by mainstream Internet users. There's a lot to be done, but I think we'll have fun while working to make the Internet safer and more secure.

I look forward to meeting many of you in the coming weeks and months, and I welcome your ideas and suggestions.

Yours in freedom,
Shari Steele

At long last, I am thrilled to announce that our executive director search is now successful! And what a success it is: we have our good friend Shari Steele, who led EFF for 15 years, coming on board to lead us.

We've known Shari for a long time. She led EFF's choice to fund Tor back in 2004-2005. She is also the one who helped create EFF's technology department, which has brought us HTTPS Everywhere and their various guides and tool assessments.

Tor's technical side is world-class, and I am excited that Shari will help Tor's organizational side become great too. She shares our core values, she brings leadership in managing and coordinating people, she has huge experience in growing a key non-profit in our space, and her work pioneering EFF's community-based funding model will be especially valuable as we continue our campaign to diversify our funding sources.

Tor is part of a larger family of civil liberties organizations, and this move makes it clear that Tor is a main figure in that family. Nick and I will focus short-term on shepherding a smooth transition out of our "interim" roles, and after that we are excited to get back to our old roles actually doing technical work. I'll let Shari pick up the conversation from here, in her upcoming blog post.

Please everybody join me in welcoming Shari!

The Tor Project is continuing its world-wide search for our new Executive Director. We need your help to find this person, whether they work for a nonprofit organization, for a tech company, at a university, for an open software project, or somewhere else entirely. We are open to candidates from lots of different backgrounds.

Here's a link to our original blog post with many more details, including how to submit candidates: Tor Project Launches Worldwide Search for a New Executive Director

An excerpt:

"The Tor Project, one of the world’s strongest advocates for privacy and anonymous, open communications is currently seeking an experienced Executive Director to lead the organization. The new Executive Director will spearhead key initiatives to make the organization even more robust in its work to advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying anonymity and privacy technologies, advancing their scientific and popular understanding, and encouraging their use."

Please take a moment to consider whether you know a candidate, likely or unlikely, who might be a great fit for this position.

Thanks!

The Tor Project is evaluating our needs and resources as we transition to a new era and begin our search for a new Executive Director. We have decided that we need better systems for sharing information and coordinating the incredibly diverse work of the Tor community.

We are recruiting an executive administrator to be at the hub of our leadership team. We seek an intuitive problem solver who can impose just the right amount of order on the ways that internal Tor communicates, makes decisions, and generally takes care of business. Our geographically and functionally diverse team has many stakeholders. A person who can step in to build processes, make connections, and provide support from all angles will be essential. The successful applicant will have the ability to translate objectives from diverse teams to a central framework that promotes better communication and support for all.

We hope and expect that applicants from many kinds of backgrounds will apply. We are not likely to find one person who meets all of our criteria for this role, but we recognize that particular strengths will make up for lack of experience in other areas. For example, a strong background in project management within the free and open source software movement might overcome lack of experience in formal office administration. We invite each candidate to make the case for how his or her skill set, knowledge, and attitude would assist in fulfilling the overall objectives of the role.

Please review the posting here: https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs-execadmin.html.en and consider sharing it within your networks. This is a phenomenal opportunity for a motivated, organized professional to make an immediate impact working at the forefront of anonymous and secure communications!

The Tor Project has two browser-related job openings available!

We are looking for a C++ browser developer to work on our Firefox-based browser, and a Firefox extension developer to work on our growing number of Firefox extensions. Our ideal candidates would be comfortable in both roles, but we are also interested in hearing from people with either skillset.

On the C++ side, your tasks would include implementing new Firefox APIs and browser behavior changes; looking for and resolving web privacy issues; fixing bugs; responding on short notice to security issues; and helping to merge patches upstream.

On the extension development side, your primary tasks will include writing patches and UI improvements for Tor Birdy, Torbutton, HTTPS-Everywhere, Tor Launcher, and an OTR plugin for InstantBird. These improvements will primarily revolve around improving usability, Tor configuration, and security for our users.

Instructions on how to apply to the C++ position can be found on the browser hacker job posting. If you would prefer to focus on extension development, you should apply to the extension developer position.

Tor is looking for a Lead QA/automation engineer!

We want to deploy nightly builds and continuous integration for as many of our key software components and platform combinations as possible. Your job would be build and deploy the initial functional versions of a wide range of testing frameworks and continuous integration systems.

This is a contract position. Candidates are expected to be capable of taking the lead in selecting, deploying, and maintaining multiple automation systems in several different programming languages.

Candidates should also be capable of reproducing bugs and writing new reproduction test cases for one or more of the testing frameworks. Eventually, we hope to add additional staff to assist in this project, but to start, you will be expected to prioritize your own work such that the most important tasks get attention first, without letting any specific core component starve for attention.

For more details, including information on how to apply, see the job posting:
https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs-lead-automation.html.en

Your job is to handle support requests via our ticketing system and our new Q&A website, as well as make sure translations for software and documentation are up to date. This is a part-time contractor position starting in Q4 2012 and renewing quarterly.

We are looking for candidates who are fluent in one of Arabic, French, Mandarin, Burmese, Vietnamese, Spanish, and English. All must be fluent in English.

See the full job description for more information.

A project coordinator is the person who brings order to chaos. You will coordinate and help track deliverables, progress, and metrics of current projects. You will also help plan future projects through proposals.

Your impact will involve:

• Deriving deliverables, deadlines, and milestones for each active contract.
• Developing timelines and schedules for completion of milestones and deliverables for each active, and occasionally proposed, contract.
• Collecting ideas and potential deliverables for the future.
• Raising concerns, timeline slips, and probability of missed deadlines to management.
• Helping with managing people's schedules, work load, and keeping various people or teams in communication with one another.
• Tracking deliverable completion.
• Developing and maintaining metrics about project completion rate and other measures as based on evidence-based project management or something similar.
• Helping contractors develop their contract deliverables for six month periods based on expected workload.
• Maintaining project status pages on trac (or whatever system we have) with deliverables, tickets, and monthly summaries of progress.
• Helping to write the monthly progress reports required for contracts.

See the job posting for information on how to apply and what you need to send in with your application.

Your job would be to work on Torbutton and patches to our Firefox-based browser, as well as a potential Android port. This would be a contractor position likely starting in October and going through Q1 2013, with the possibility of later in 2013 and beyond. There may also be a possibility for part-time work prior to October.

The purpose of our browser is to build a private-by-design reference implementation of "Do Not Track", but through the alteration of browser behavior and without the need for regulation or begging.

Your job will include triaging, diagnosing, and fixing bugs; looking for and resolving web privacy issues; responding on short notice to security issues; and working collaboratively with coworkers and volunteers on implementing new features and web behavior changes.

We'd also need help making our code more maintainable, testable, and mergeable by upstream. Sometimes, we need to drop everything and scramble to implement last-minute fixes, or to deploy urgent security updates. You'd also be reviewing other people's code, designs, and academic research papers, and looking for ways to improve upon them.

See the job posting for information on how to apply and what you need to send in with your application.

For an even more detailed overview of the full breadth and depth of the work you'd be doing, have a look at The Design and Implementation of the Tor Browser, especially The Design Requirements section.