About the role
You'll be the technical owner of the IOI protocol. You'll define the primitives every industrial system speaks, the node architecture every company runs, the permission model that keeps each node private, and the command layer that lets AI agents act safely in the physical world. Your decisions become the foundation that customers, partners, and eventually outside developers build on.
You'll work directly with Phillip and our engineering leads.
Your first 90 days
Ship a production adapter that brings a new class of physical system, such as live fleet telemetry or a warehouse system, into IOI.
Publish the next revision of IOI's core primitives and capability descriptors, with a reference implementation and a migration path.
Own the architecture for autonomous capacity discovery: how physical assets advertise what they can do, and how agents discover, negotiate, and commit work across nodes.
What you’ll do
- Own the protocol. Set the schema, versioning, and extension model for IOI's primitives and capability descriptors.
- Build the node. Architect the node runtime that ingests a company's systems and telemetry and keeps its physical state current.
- Design the permission model. Keep customer-owned nodes private by default, with fine-grained, auditable grants between nodes, agents, and hardware.
- Build the command layer. Define how agents query state and issue actions safely, including our MCP server over IOI nodes.
- Make it a platform. Ship the specs, SDKs, and docs that let other engineers and companies build on IOI.
- Raise the bar. Set technical direction, review designs, and mentor the engineers who join after you.
Skills you’ll need
- Protocol and schema design: versioning, backward compatibility, extensibility, and capability modeling.
- Distributed systems: consistency models, idempotency, event sourcing, and stream processing (Kafka or similar).
- Java and Spring Boot at production scale.
- API design across REST, gRPC, and event-driven interfaces.
- Data modeling across document and relational stores (MongoDB, PostgreSQL), including time-series and geospatial data.
- Security architecture: authentication, authorization, multi-tenant isolation, and fine-grained permissions.
- Cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code (Azure, Terraform, Kubernetes).
- Observability: tracing, metrics, and alerting for systems that coordinate real operations.
Nice to have: MCP and agent tool interfaces; industrial and robotics protocols (OPC UA, MQTT, ROS 2); logistics data standards (EDI X12); standards-body or open-source maintainer experience; TypeScript.
Who you are
- 8+ years building production systems, with clear ownership of architecture that other teams or companies built on.
- You've designed an interface that held up as adoption grew, and you can explain why it did.
- You write specs and docs that other engineers enjoy reading.
- You're energized by open questions and comfortable making the call.
Compensation
$220K to $280K plus meaningful equity. Health, dental, and vision. San Francisco, in person.
How we hire
- Meet Phillip, Oway's founder.
- Meet our engineering leads, usually one call with one or two people.
- A technical evaluation, with details shared after step two.
About Oway
Oway is building the coordination OS for the physical economy. IOI connects the legacy systems industry runs on with fleets, factories and robots through one open schema, Juno is the industrial AI that acts on it, and Oway OS is where the work runs. We’re backed by Y Combinator and General Catalyst.