Forward Deployed Engineer

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 We're looking for exceptional Forward Deployed Engineers to work directly with the organizations building the next generation of AI products on OpenClaw.

This is a highly technical, customer-facing engineering role. You'll embed with some of the most ambitious AI companies, Fortune 500 enterprises, research institutions, and infrastructure providers to help them deploy, customize, and scale OpenClaw in production.

You'll operate at the intersection of software engineering, distributed systems, AI infrastructure, product thinking, and customer success. Every engagement is different. One week you may be helping an enterprise deploy thousands of secure autonomous agents. The next you may be building custom orchestration layers, contributing features upstream into OpenClaw, or helping define new open standards for agent interoperability.

Success in this role requires exceptional engineering ability, strong communication skills, and a bias toward ownership. You'll become one of the primary technical representatives of the Foundation while helping shape the future of the OpenClaw ecosystem.

• This role will either be remote (based in the US), or onsite at our donors & sponsors' locations across the US.

What You'll Do

• Partner directly with customers to design and deploy production OpenClaw systems.
• Build custom integrations, infrastructure, and tooling to solve complex technical challenges.
• Work across backend services, distributed systems, APIs, identity, security, orchestration, and cloud infrastructure.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues, performance bottlenecks, and scaling challenges.
• Contribute reusable improvements back into the OpenClaw open source platform.
• Collaborate with Foundation maintainers to prioritize features based on ecosystem needs.
• Help organizations migrate existing AI workflows onto OpenClaw.
• Design deployment architectures across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
• Create technical documentation, deployment guides, and reference implementations.
• Become a trusted technical advisor for customers adopting OpenClaw.
• Represent the Foundation within the broader open source community.

You Might Be a Great Fit If You

• Love solving difficult technical problems alongside customers.
• Enjoy moving between architecture discussions, coding, debugging, and production deployments.
• Can quickly understand unfamiliar systems and make meaningful contributions.
• Are comfortable working across the entire software stack.
• Thrive in ambiguous environments where every customer problem is unique.
• Enjoy open source and believe community-driven software creates stronger ecosystems.
• Prefer ownership over process and execution over meetings.

Qualifications Required

• 4-15+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong experience with Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, or similar modern languages.
• Experience deploying distributed systems in production.
• Deep understanding of APIs, networking, authentication, cloud infrastructure, and backend architecture.
• Experience working directly with customers, users, or cross-functional stakeholders.
• Strong debugging and systems-thinking skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Ability to travel occasionally for customer engagements, conferences, or Foundation events.

Nice to Have

• Experience building AI agents, LLM applications, or agent frameworks.
• Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Experience with retrieval systems, vector databases, or AI infrastructure.
• Experience contributing to open source software.
• Knowledge of security, identity, permissions, or distributed authorization systems.
• Experience with multi-agent orchestration platforms.
• Previous experience in solutions engineering, developer relations, or forward deployed engineering.

What Success Looks Like Within your first year you will have:

• Successfully deployed OpenClaw into production across multiple organizations.
• Contributed meaningful improvements back into the core open source project.
• Built reusable deployment patterns adopted across the ecosystem.
• Become a trusted advisor for strategic customers.
• Helped shape the Foundation's technical roadmap through direct customer feedback.
• Improved developer experience across installation, deployment, observability, and scaling.

Compensation Range: $200K - $300K