Program Manager

In This Role, Your Responsibilities Will Be

Own NI’s Open-Source Software Engagements

• Define and execute the strategy to increase meaningful community contributions across current and future repositories.
• Reduce friction to contributing by improving onboarding, documentation, governance clarity, and workflows.
• Represent NI in the relevant steering committees and ensure priorities reflect both business needs and community value.
• Highlight major contributions and outcomes internally and externally, in coordination with communications.

Over time, the goal is to build a morescalable, self-governing model—supported by clear criteria, repeatable processes, and strong community leadership—while maintaining strong NI engagement.

Success criteria
: sustained growth in contributors and contribution activity, improving contributor experience, and a durable governance model that scales.

Lead cross-functional community programs that support the software business

• Translate business goals (confidence, engagement, growth) into clear program plans with owners, milestones, and success measures.
• Coordinate execution across R&D, product, marketing/communications, regions, and business units—aligning priorities, timelines, and messaging.
• Establish a practical operating cadence (planning, decision forums, progress tracking, escalation paths) so work moves forward consistently.
• Capture community signal, synthesize it into actionable themes, and ensure follow-through with internal owners.

Success criteria
: programs that deliver reliably, show measurable community impact, and support software growth and customer confidence.

Strengthen the digital community to enable scale

• Help drive the “digital counterpart” to physical community engagement—supporting user groups, Champions, open-source collaboration, and broader community touchpoints.
• Partner with internal teams to improve discoverability, participation, and ongoing engagement across online channels and platforms.
• Drive alignment on an engagement model across  and third-party sites like Discord, Linked In, Distribution-run communities, etc…

Success criteria
: growth in digital engagement

Depending on business needs, you may also help lead or program-manage related efforts such as:

• Champions Program: monthly roadmap discussions, shaping agendas and dialogue with NI leadership, and activating Champions to support outreach programs (e.g., user groups).
• Beta program: improving participation and engagement and increasing the value of community involvement.
• Community spotlight and social campaigns in partnership with the social media team.
• Technical content coordination (webinars, tutorials, events, documentation improvements) by aligning technical owners and ensuring delivery.
• Academic engagement: leveraging community advocates to engage students and increase awareness of NI software and confidence in the future pipeline.

This list is intentionally flexible and will evolve based on what the business needs most.

This is a highly collaborative role that requires strong communication skills and a passion for bringing stakeholders together to work towards a common goal. You will regularly interact with some of our most knowledgeable and passionate users, ensuring they have the support and engagement from R&D necessary for their success.

To succeed in this role, you will either need to have or cultivate the following skillsets:

• Software Product Management experience working with R&D to review and prioritize feature work and bandwidth allocation.
• Experience working on open-source initiatives and/or using open-source libraries (strongly preferred).
• Familiarity with Git-related workflows and coordination of highly distributed development teams.
• Strong presentation skills for recruiting collaborators and internal communication.
• Familiarity with LabVIEW and software development for test engineering applications.
• Ability to manage multiple concurrent programs and balance competing priorities.

Finally, a candidate is ideally bought into the role of community collaboration as an engine for innovation and empowerment of our…