About 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 role involves designing, building, maintaining, and evolving core components of the OpenClaw platform while supporting the broader contributor community. Success is measured by enabling an entire community to build alongside you, making this ideal for engineers who love open source and want to work on foundational AI systems.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Requirements
- 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
- 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
Skills
- 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
- Git
Work Type
- Full-time
Experience Level
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
About the Company
- 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.
