Public AI Research Engineer
Metagov is a 501(c)3 nonprofit research-to-infrastructure laboratory focused on community sovereignty, network governance, and statecraft in the age of AI. It cultivates tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age, working with researchers, practitioners, and online communities (e.g., DAOs, online governance experiments) rather than traditional commercial clients.
Projects
About Metagov
Metagov is a nonprofit research-to-infrastructure laboratory, founded in 2019 out of a Harvard Law School seminar on "Governing Virtual Worlds" and spun out as an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit in January 2020. Its mission is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age, working toward a governance layer for the internet that is empowering, creative, interconnected, and accountable. The organization operates through three interdependent pillars: Community (a membership-based network of researchers and practitioners), Research (grant-funded projects led by Research Directors), and Operations (participatory organizational infrastructure). Metagov runs a weekly research seminar, community calls, and orientation sessions, and incubates projects such as DAOstar (a standards body for the DAO ecosystem), KOI Pond/GovBase (a research dataset project), Interoperable Deliberative Tools, and Public AI (focused on a new political economy for AI). It serves researchers, practitioners, online communities, DAOs, and protocol ecosystems, and is funded by a range of foundations and crypto-ecosystem organizations including the Ethereum Foundation, Filecoin Foundation, Optimism Collective, Mina Foundation, Arbitrum, Aragon, ENS, and NEAR, among others.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
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