The posting
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
