Member of Technical Staff

About the Foundation:

The OpenClaw Foundation is the steward of the world's largest open source AI agent project. Its mission is grounded in a foundational conviction: that AI must be open, safe, and ultimately owned by the individuals and communities who use it.

The Foundation operates across three core mandates:

Advancing research into the human-agent relationship while continuously evolving the OpenClaw platform;

Maintaining and hardening the codebase to ensure security, reliability, and long-term sustainability;

Establishing interoperability standards for the emerging agent era, defining how agents configure, communicate, establish trust, transact, and represent user identity across ecosystems.

Modeled after the governance structures that shaped the open web and modern computing infrastructure, the Foundation serves as a neutral, multi-stakeholder convening body — the equivalent of W3C or the Linux Foundation for the agentic AI era. Major laboratories and infrastructure providers collaborate under its umbrella on shared, vendor-neutral infrastructure, with no single organization controlling the roadmap or direction.

The OpenClaw Foundation believes that individuals should have full sovereignty over their AI: their data, their interactions, and the behavior and personality of their agents. Open source is not incidental to this mission but central to it — code must remain free to use, modify, and build upon. The future of agentic AI will be defined by a broad, developer-driven community, not prescribed by any single commercial interest.

The Role

The OpenClaw Foundation is seeking exceptional Members of Technical Staff (MTS) to serve as full-time maintainers, builders, and stewards of the OpenClaw ecosystem.

This is not a traditional software engineering role.

You will operate as both an open-source maintainer and product engineer, responsible for designing, building, maintaining, and evolving core components of the OpenClaw platform while supporting the broader contributor community that helps shape it.

The Foundation's technical staff are responsible for the long-term health of the ecosystem. They ship production code, review community contributions, guide architectural decisions, improve developer experience, maintain infrastructure, and help establish the technical standards that will underpin the future of agentic AI.

Unlike engineers at traditional startups, success is measured not only by what you build yourself, but by how effectively you enable an entire community to build alongside you.

This role is ideal for engineers who love open source, enjoy engaging with contributors, and want to work on infrastructure that may become foundational to the next generation of AI systems.

What You'll Do

Build Core OpenClaw Technology

Design and implement new platform capabilities across the OpenClaw ecosystem

Develop production-quality software used by developers, researchers, enterprises, and end users

Build systems that support large-scale AI agent deployment and orchestration

Improve platform reliability, performance, scalability, and usability

Contribute across the stack as Foundation priorities evolve

Maintain Open Source Projects

Serve as a maintainer for one or more OpenClaw repositories

Review pull requests and provide technical guidance to contributors

Manage issue triage and community requests

Help define technical roadmaps and project priorities

Ensure code quality, maintainability, and long-term sustainability

Uphold governance and contribution standards across Foundation projects

Collaborate with the Community

Engage directly with developers and contributors

Support community members through design reviews, technical discussions, and mentorship

Participate in working groups and ecosystem initiatives

Help create a welcoming and productive contributor experience

Encourage external contributions and community ownership

Advance Agent Infrastructure

Help define how agents configure, communicate, establish trust, transact, and represent identity

Contribute to interoperability initiatives and standards development

Build vendor-neutral infrastructure that can be adopted across the ecosystem

Collaborate with industry partners and researchers on emerging agent technologies

Improve Developer Experience

Build tooling that makes OpenClaw easier to use and contribute to

Improve APIs, SDKs, documentation, testing frameworks, and developer workflows

Reduce friction for both users and contributors

Help establish best practices for building and deploying AI agents

Support Foundation Research & Innovation

Collaborate with researchers exploring the human-agent relationship

Prototype and evaluate new capabilities

Translate research findings into production-ready systems

Explore emerging technologies that can strengthen the OpenClaw ecosystem

Areas of Ownership

Members of Technical Staff may work across a variety of domains including:

AI Agent Runtime Systems

Distributed Systems & Infrastructure

Identity & Trust Frameworks

Open Standards & Protocols

Agent Communication Systems

Security & Privacy

Developer Tooling

SDKs & APIs

Product Engineering

Platform Architecture

Research Prototyping

Community Tooling & Governance Systems

Candidates are not expected to have expertise in all areas.

Who You Are

Required Qualifications

5+ years of professional software engineering experience

Strong proficiency in modern software development practices

Experience building and maintaining production systems

Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, backend systems, or developer platforms

Experience working with Git and modern software development workflows

Excellent technical communication skills

Ability to work independently in highly ambiguous environments

Passion for open source and developer ecosystems

Preferred Qualifications

Prior experience as an open-source maintainer or major contributor

Experience building AI, machine learning, or agent-based systems

Experience with developer platforms, infrastructure products, or SDKs

Familiarity with standards development or protocol design

Experience operating large-scale distributed systems

Security, identity, or privacy expertise

Experience supporting developer communities

Previous involvement in open-source foundations or standards organizations