This opportunity is funded by and offered in collaboration with Current AI, a Paris-based nonprofit.

Location: Fully remote, with a preference for the US, Canada, or Europe
Commitment: Part-time contract
Compensation: $20,000 over three months, with opportunity to transition to a longer, full-time engagement
Start date: ASAP

Public AI is AI as public infrastructure. Think water, electricity, public libraries, the BBC. We already serve Apertus (Switzerland) and SEA-LION (Singapore) to users around the world at chat.publicai.co and platform.publicai.co, and we’re scaling toward national-scale inference with partners including CSCS, AI Singapore, AI Sweden, and Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

We’re a small, scrappy team punching above our weight, and we’re growing the engineering team. As a Public AI Research Engineer, you’ll work alongside other research engineers and report directly to the CTO. You’ll get your hands on real public infrastructure serving real users, and you’ll help us figure out what a fully open source AI stack should actually look like in production.

This is a great fit if you’re early- to mid-career, hungry to build, and want to learn at the edge of inference infrastructure, sovereign AI, and public-interest technology.

You will

This is a hands-on role that spans product, frontend, backend, and open-source community work. In your first three months, you’ll likely:

  • Track and integrate the open-source AI stack. OpenWebUI ships fast. vLLM ships fast. LiteLLM, MCP servers, eval frameworks — all moving. You’ll keep us current, fork where we need to, upstream where we can, and stitch everything into a platform that works.
  • Ship product across the stack. Frontend changes in our chat, backend changes in our routing, glue code between services. You’ll touch all of it. We need someone who’s comfortable shipping a UI change in the morning and debugging an inference backend in the afternoon.
  • Drive our open-source presence. Make our repos at github.com/forpublicai something contributors can actually engage with — clear issues, good docs, fast review. Help us behave like a real open-source project, not a closed shop with public code.
  • Contribute directly to the wider open-source AI ecosystem. Submit compatibility PRs across open-source and open-weight components, build demos that showcase how different pieces work together on public infrastructure, and fill in gaps in specific OS projects where the stack is close but not quite there for real deployments.
  • Prototype new capabilities. Routing transparency, endpoint provenance, MCP integrations, multimodal support, jurisdiction-aware handling. We have a long roadmap and not enough hands.
  • Be a product thinker, not just a coder. Notice what’s broken in the user experience and fix it. Push back on roadmap decisions. Bring ideas, not just execution.

You’ll have wide latitude. We need someone who sees what’s broken and ships it, not someone who waits for tickets.

What we’re looking for

Required

  • Demonstrated open-source chops — contributions, maintainership, or projects of your own that we can look at, ideally including upstream PRs and integration demos
  • Comfort moving across the stack: frontend (React/Svelte/similar), backend (Python/TypeScript/Go), and the glue between
  • Familiarity with the open-source AI stack — OpenWebUI, vLLM, LiteLLM, MCP, or similar
  • Product instincts: you care about what users experience, not just what compiles
  • Founder energy — you ship fast, you own what you ship, and you don’t need permission to make things better
  • Ability to travel occasionally for team workshops

Most important: intrinsic motivation.

This is a nonprofit, open-source project building public goods. We need someone who actually cares about that mission and wants to build infrastructure for the public, not for a series B. We’re looking for smart, creative, scrappy, intrinsically motivated, and moderately rebellious people who will challenge themselves, challenge us, and push for better. If you need a manager to tell you what to ship next, this isn’t the right role.

Nice to have

  • Maintainership or significant contribution history on a project in the AI/ML or developer tools space, including compatibility fixes across open-weight models and their surrounding tooling
  • Experience launching and running your own open-source project, startup, or community
  • Background in public-interest technology, civic tech, or research infrastructure
  • A track record of turning messy multi-repo systems into coherent platforms

Logistics

  • Location: Fully remote, with a preference for the US, Canada, or Europe. Must be available for occasional team workshops.
  • Employment: Part-time contract, $20,000 over three months. Strong fits will have the opportunity to transition to a longer or full-time engagement.
  • Reports to: CTO

Send a note to josh@publicai.co with whatever best represents you — CV, GitHub, projects you’re proud of, things you’ve built, things you’ve broken and fixed. Tell us why public AI matters to you.

We read every application.

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