Head of Design
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 30, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 27, 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
The OpenClaw Foundation is seeking a Head of Design to define the design vision, systems, and experiences that shape how people interact with AI agents.
This is a foundational, highly hands-on role for a design leader with exceptional taste and a track record of building and shipping best-in-class products from zero to one. You'll establish a cohesive design language across the OpenClaw ecosystem, develop scalable design systems, and invent new interaction paradigms for how people collaborate with, delegate to, and maintain control over AI agents.
You'll operate at the intersection of product strategy, interaction design, visual design, and engineering - moving from long-term vision to rapid prototyping and production-ready execution. You'll set the bar for design quality across consumer experiences, developer tools, and agent interfaces, while creating systems that enable a broader open source ecosystem to build cohesive products.
What You'll Do
Define design vision: Establish a distinctive design philosophy and product direction for OpenClaw, setting a high bar for craft, usability, and visual quality.
Build zero-to-one products: Lead products from concept through prototyping, implementation, and launch, translating emerging AI capabilities into intuitive, best-in-class experiences.
Own the design system: Build and evolve shared components, design tokens, interaction patterns, and visual standards that scale across products and platforms.
Invent agent interactions: Design new paradigms for delegation, memory, permissions, identity, trust, and human-agent collaboration.
Stay hands-on: Personally drive product design, visual exploration, prototyping, and implementation details, partnering directly with engineers to bring ideas to life.
Shape product strategy: Work with Foundation leadership, researchers, and engineers to identify opportunities, prioritize initiatives, and translate ambitious ideas into shipped products.
Scale design across the ecosystem: Establish principles and reusable tools that help contributors and third-party developers build consistent, high-quality experiences.
What We're Looking For
A proven track record of building and shipping exceptional zero-to-one products, with clear ownership from early concept through launch.
Exceptional design taste, visual craft, and a strong point of view on the future of software and human-computer interaction.
Deep expertise in design systems, including building scalable component libraries, interaction patterns, and visual languages from the ground up.
The ability to combine strategic vision with hands-on execution, moving fluidly between product direction, rapid prototyping, and pixel-level detail.
Strong interaction design and systems thinking, with the ability to simplify complex technical capabilities into intuitive user experiences.
Technical fluency and a history of close collaboration with engineering teams to ship polished, production-ready products.
Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and influencing direction without relying on large teams or heavy processes.
A compelling portfolio demonstrating product impact, design excellence, and end-to-end ownership.
Nice to Have
Experience designing AI-native products, autonomous agents, assistants, or emerging interaction models.
Experience building developer tools, technical platforms, or infrastructure products.
Contributions to open source projects or experience designing for distributed communities.
Familiarity with agent identity, permissions, privacy, security, or interoperability.
Experience with front-end development or code-based prototyping.