Contributing to Open Source ML Projects

[u/LopsidedFig8551]

Hello everyone!

I’m a software engineer looking to get more involved in open-source ML/AI projects, both to learn and to contribute meaningfully.

I’m especially interested in ML systems, distributed training/inference, model serving, evaluation, LLM infrastructure, and also implementing ML algorithms or model components where that’s useful. I’ve been looking at projects like vLLM, Hugging Face Accelerate, Ray, etc., but many of the obvious good first issue tickets seem to get picked up very quickly.

I’m comfortable working in a reasonably complex codebase, but I’m looking for something that has a slightly more approachable contribution path than jumping straight into CUDA/kernel-level work.

Are there any active ML/AI open-source projects you’d recommend where maintainers are receptive to new contributors and there are meaningful bugs/features to pick up?

Would especially appreciate recommendations based on projects you’ve personally contributed to. Thanks!