Senior Python Engineer

WE ARE LOOKING FOR

The Open Home Foundation is seeking a passionate Senior Python developer, based in Europe, to join our Home Assistant department as a full-time Software Engineer. This team is responsible for the open development, maintenance, and enhancement of the Home Assistant platform; supporting new functionality aligned with our roadmap and enabling the wider community to contribute and innovate easily.

Home Assistant is a highly popular open-source project, the largest open source project on GitHub by the number of contributors we have each year. As a result, we also receive many open-source contributions. In this role, you will work closely with the open-source community to review contributions and ensure seamless integration into our platform.

In this role, your main daily tasks will involve bringing Home Assistant to the next level of AI capabilities. You will help build the foundation on which AI features across our platform are created: the APIs and interfaces that let language models work with the home, Assist - our assistant that people talk to or chat with, in-product agents, and the open standards (such as the Model Context Protocol) that connect Home Assistant to the wider agentic world. Always private, local-first, and by choice. This is not a list of features to deliver, but a long-term direction to help shape: AI is becoming part of how people use and manage their homes, and Home Assistant will lead that in the open. You will ensure the successful integration of features that align with our mission to build a more private, open, and sustainable smart home ecosystem.

A note on the job title: at its heart, this is an AI engineering role, and we deliberately didn't put that in the title. Home Assistant runs in millions of homes, and AI features need to be engineered with the same rigor as everything else in our core. We are looking for a strong Python engineer who has built and shipped serious LLM-powered software, not someone whose experience stops at writing prompts.

WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO DO

• Design and build the AI foundation of Home Assistant: the conversation APIs, LLM integrations, and the typed tool layers that every AI feature in our platform builds upon.

• Create in-product agents that help people build and manage their homes together with AI, grounded in their home's actual configuration, and always with the user in control: the assistant proposes, the user approves.

• Connect Home Assistant to the agentic world through open standards like MCP, so external AI systems can work with and build on the home, safely, with properly scoped permissions, and always under the user's control.

• Grow Assist from home control into home management: make our assistant context-aware, give it memory across sessions, and teach it to help with documentation, configuration, and diagnosing problems, whether people speak to their home or type to it. All of it with the choice between local and cloud models.

• Make AI features easy to discover, set up, and disable: AI in Home Assistant is powerful, optional, and always under the user's control.

• Build AI-powered workflows that help us and our community manage and structure the largest open source project on GitHub: think issue triage, review assistance, and contributor tooling.

• Conduct code reviews of pull requests from your teammates and our community, identify and resolve technical issues, ensuring we maintain high coding standards.

• Collaborate with our community to investigate and address reported issues.

• Provide input and help with deciding on architectural proposals and changes to our code base.

WHAT YOU NEED TO HAVE

• 5+ years of experience working in Python back-end development.

• 3+ years of experience working with asyncio and threading.

• Built and shipped LLM-powered features in production Python: tool calling, agent loops, streaming, evaluation, and handling the many ways models fail. Using AI coding assistants or prompting alone does not qualify.

• Experience building with the Model Context Protocol: you have designed and implemented MCP servers or clients, or comparable tool-calling interfaces for agents.

• Experience with local, on-device inference (e.g., Ollama, llama.cpp).

• A pragmatic view on AI: you know what language models are great at, where they fall flat, and how to design systems that stay reliable, private, and safe regardless.

• Strong problem-solving abilities, attention to detail, and ability to work independently.

• Strong experience working effectively in a remote, asynchronous environment where written communication drives collaboration.

• Experience with Git and GitHub.

• Professional Fluency in English: Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

• European Residency: You must be currently based and eligible to work within Europe.

IT WOULD BE GREAT IF YOU ALSO HAVE

• A passion for smart homes and automation.

• Experience as a Home Assistant user.

• Experience contributing to open-source projects.

• Affinity with open-source development philosophy.

• Experience developing an integration or custom integration for Home Assistant.

• Contributed to Home Assistant or related open-source projects.

• Experience building agentic developer tooling or AI-assisted workflows for engineering teams.

WHAT WE OFFER YOU

The Open Home Foundation is a fully remote organization that uses Remote to employ people from all over the world. You will be a normal salaried employee in your country.

This is a full-time position for 40 hours per week. Because we are a fully remote company, there is no fixed schedule. For the purpose of team communication, we do try to ensure at least 3 hours of overlap in the workday. You will report to the Home Assistant Lead, who is based in the Netherlands.

Core to the establishment of the Open Home Foundation was the well-being of the people building the future of the smart home. We will provide all the benefits required by the country you reside in. However, we also want to make sure all our employees, regardless of country of origin, get at least a minimal set of benefits, including:

• Five weeks (twenty-five days) of paid time off.

• Fourteen days of paid sick leave if your country/laws treat them as unpaid.

• Six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid parental leave to be used in the first year after birth. We will provide the missing days if your country/laws do not provide such compensation.

• A budget for your work hardware once you start. After three years, you may keep this equipment for personal use.

• A 50% contribution to your internet connection fee at your home workspace.

• One day every two weeks to work on your personal projects.

• If you are currently working on Home Assistant-related side projects, you can spend work time maintaining them.

When first offering a position to a new member, the Open Home Foundation aims to provide a total compensation package that matches the 75th percentile for the new hire's role, seniority, and local market rates. For a Software Engineer in our primary operating countries, the approximate yearly compensation will be the following:

• Netherlands: 92.000 EUR

• UK: 90.500 GBP

• Spain: 77.500 EUR

• Portugal: 81.000 EUR

• Other countries: Compensation can be discussed during the first interview. These figures may be adjusted based on experience, qualifications, and work hours.

ABOUT US

The Open Home Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Switzerland, with the objective of fighting for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. It does this by supporting the development of open-source projects, and open connectivity and communication standards.

A big part of this is Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/, the biggest https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/#the-state-of-open-source open-source project in number of contributors, but the Open Home Foundation also owns or collaborates with other projects important to promoting privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home, like:

• Open hardware tools (e.g., ESPHome https://esphome.io/, ESP Web Tools https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/).

• Open standards (e.g., Python Matter Server https://github.com/home-assistant-libs/python-matter-server, Z-Wave JS https://github.com/zwave-js, ZigPy https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy, BTHome https://bthome.io/, Improv Wi-Fi https://www.improv-wifi.com/).

• Open voice (e.g., Rhasspy https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy, Wyoming Protocol https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/wyoming/, Piper https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).

• Music Assistant https://www.music-assistant.io/.

THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS

1. Apply for the role.

2. Our HR team will review your application with the hiring manager.

3. Interview with HR.

4. Technical assessment (unless already a contributor to our project).

5. Interview with the team & manager.

6. Offer.

7. Join our team!