> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Forward Deployed Engineer Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/bc34865d20736808 OpenClaw Foundation posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA, at $200,000–$300,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. A customer-facing engineer embeds with organizations to deploy, customize, and scale OpenClaw in production, spanning distributed systems, AI infrastructure, and customer engineering. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [OpenClaw Foundation](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openclaw-foundation) Posted Jul 6, 2026 by OpenClaw Foundation · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 **$200,000–$300,000** San Francisco, CA On-site Full-time A customer-facing engineer embeds with organizations to deploy, customize, and scale OpenClaw in production, spanning distributed systems, AI infrastructure, and customer engineering. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fbc34865d20736808&placement=top) - [View posting at OpenClaw Foundation](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openclaw-foundation-inc/3ee7c315-c602-4d03-aaaf-ae88c88eba32/application) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay $200K–$300K Above the median Midpoint $250K · median $190K This job $200K to $300K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. ### The work Builds what the customer runs Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept (not covered) 3. Implementation 4. Operations Travel **Required, amount not stated** - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Individual contributor ### What they ask for Experience - **4+ years** professional software engineering Background - **Software engineering** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 4+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in San Francisco, CA. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: San Francisco, CA - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Remote work restrictions**: Either remote based in the US or onsite at donors' and sponsors' locations across the US. - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Travel**: Travel required, amount not stated - **Pay**: ## More like this [Cloudflare](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/cloudflare) ### [Senior Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/df0b7e1d2651bcb5) Austin, TX · San Francisco, CA Hybrid 4w ago $194,000–$266,000 [Anyscale](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/anyscale) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer - AI/ML Platforms](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ec34a2647dc8d7d6) San Francisco, CA 4mo ago $250,000–$275,000 [NVIDIA](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/nvidia) ### [Senior MLOps Engineer - DSX Enablement](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d111a9977bdaacbb) Santa Clara, CA · Seattle, WA · US remote Remote 2mo ago $184,000–$356,500 ## The job description from OpenClaw Foundation Posted by OpenClaw Foundation on Jul 6, 2026 ### 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. [View posting at OpenClaw Foundation](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openclaw-foundation-inc/3ee7c315-c602-4d03-aaaf-ae88c88eba32/application) ## About OpenClaw Foundation A US nonprofit stewards the MIT-licensed OpenClaw personal AI agent and convenes organizations around open agent infrastructure and standards. 10–50 people ## Similar jobs [Scale AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/scale-ai) ### [Senior Frontier Agents Engineer (Applied AI)](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ad5a80e79ff38092) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY · +1 more 3mo ago $216,000–$270,000 [EY](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/ey) ### [EY-Parthenon - Strategy and Execution - Growth Platforms - Software Engineer - Sr Assoc/Consultant](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/db242f263e15ea06) New York, NY · Atlanta, GA · +12 more Hybrid 2mo ago $130,000–$185,000 [HealthLeap](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/healthleap) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/dd1c68c037e1d288) San Francisco, CA On-site 6w ago $200,000–$275,000 [Edison Scientific](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/edison-scientific) ### [Member of Technical Staff, Cloud Software Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ec956d3e06abdc40) San Francisco, CA On-site 2mo ago $175,000–$240,000 [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) ### [Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise - EDU](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/4b0baa0ee913def4) New York, NY · San Francisco, CA Remote New · Yesterday $251,000–$278,000 - [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior) - [Similar jobs in SF Bay Area](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=sf-bay-area) - [Similar jobs that build what the customer runs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=builds-for-customers) Hiring at OpenClaw Foundation and want this page changed or removed? 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