About the program
LFX Mentorship is the Linux Foundation's successor to its Core Infrastructure project grants: paid, mentored, twelve-week scopes posted directly by foundation projects like Kubernetes, PyTorch, Envoy and CNCF natives. Each scope is a concrete, pre-negotiated piece of work - you apply to the job listing, not to a vague idea.
Because the scopes are defined before mentees apply, LFX is the closest thing open source has to a real contract: agreed deliverables, agreed stipend, three terms a year, and no summer bottleneck. Term 3 is in session right now.
Primary stack
Technical focus
The path
- 01Browse open scopes (always on)
Mentors publish fixed 12-week scopes with stipend bands and required skills - read the scope like a job description.
- 02Apply to one scope
Short proposal tied to the scope's deliverables. Prior PRs in that project help but are not mandatory.
- 03Mentor selects (4 weeks before term)
Each term has a selection window; projects run on a fixed calendar you can plan around.
- 04Ship the scope (12 weeks)
Weekly syncs, a mid-term checkpoint, and a final demo or merged milestone reviewed by the mentor and project leads.
- 05Get paid and stay
Stipends land on completion; LFX alumni get first look at the next term's scopes.
Who it's for
- Developers who want scoped, contract-style work instead of an open-ended summer
- Anyone targeting cloud-native, AI or systems projects under the foundation umbrella
- People who need a schedule that fits around a job or semester - three starts per year
What you walk away with
- USD 1,500 - 3,000 per completed term
- A merged, demoed deliverable inside a Linux Foundation project
- Listing in the public LFX mentee directory that recruiters search
- Fast lane to CNCF project maintainer conversations
Program timeline
Calendar positions for the 2026 cycle - the marker shows October, where you are now.
- Term 1Mar - Jun
- Term 2Jun - Sep
- Term 3Sep - Decin session
Organizations
Reading the participation record...
Flagship LFX Mentorship projects
Browse all program projects
kubernetes★ 128.2kProduction-Grade Container Scheduling and Management
prometheus★ 66.3kThe Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.
etcd★ 52.3kDistributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system
istio★ 38.4kConnect, secure, control, and observe services.
helm★ 30.3kThe Kubernetes Package Manager
harbor★ 29.5kAn open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content.
More programs we track
Everything else on the calendar - 12 other mentored routes from first PR to paid season.
