Public AI Research Engineer
Metagov is a laboratory for digital governance and a community of research and practice gathered around the mission to cultivate tools, practices, and communities to enable self-governance in the digital age. It operates as a nonprofit research organization.
About Metagov
Metagov's mission is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. Their vision is to work toward a governance layer for the internet that is empowering, creative, interconnected, and accountable. Metagov was founded in 2019 and spun out as an independent nonprofit in January 2020. Their original goal was to describe, support, and expand the right to self-governance in online communities, which is enabled and circumscribed by the platform's architecture. Metagovernance describes two related roles: (1) enabling and constraining users’ ability to create their own institutions, and (2) governing the interaction between separate institutions, from small chat groups to billion-dollar blockchain protocols. The community primarily convenes online in the Metagov Slack to coordinate projects, discuss research in online governance, plan seminars, convene governance experiments, collaborate with other organizations, and advance research outputs.
Skills
About the Role
You will work hands-on across product, frontend, backend, and open-source community work. You will track and integrate components of the open-source AI stack, ship UI and backend changes, prototype new capabilities, and improve repository documentation and contributor workflows. You will identify UX issues, implement fixes, and help maintain a coherent multi-repo platform. You must be comfortable moving across React/Svelte frontends and Python/TypeScript/Go backends, and be available for occasional team workshops.
Requirements
- Demonstrated open-source contributions or maintainership
- Comfort across frontend (React, Svelte) and backend (Python, TypeScript, Go)
- Familiarity with OpenWebUI, vLLM, LiteLLM, MCP or similar
- Strong product instincts
- Ability to ship quickly and own what you ship
- Ability to travel occasionally for workshops
- Maintainership or significant contributions in AI/ML or developer tools (nice to have)
- Experience launching or running open-source projects or communities (nice to have)
- Background in public-interest technology or research infrastructure (nice to have)
- Track record of turning multi-repo systems into coherent platforms (nice to have)
Responsibilities
- Track and integrate the open-source AI stack
- Ship product features across frontend and backend
- Build glue code and debug inference backends
- Drive open-source presence through clear issues, docs, and reviews
- Prototype new capabilities such as routing transparency and multimodal support
- Notice and fix user experience issues
- Attend occasional team workshops