About the role

Staff Engineer, IOI Protocol

Design the protocol that lets machines, software, and AI agents understand the physical world.

About Oway

Oway is an industrial automation and research company building IOI, the Internet of Industrials: a standardized protocol that lets industrial systems communicate their physical state and capabilities to software, AI agents, and one another.

The internet gave computers a common language. The physical economy still doesn't have one. Factories, fleets, warehouses, and soon robots run on closed systems that can't see or command each other, so most coordination still happens by phone, email, and spreadsheet.

Our thesis is that logistics is the foundational language of industry. Nearly every physical business can be described with the same primitives: what exists, where it is, where it needs to go, capacity, time, cost, constraints, storage, and transformation. IOI translates those states, wherever they live today (ERPs, TMSs, WMSs, sensors, vehicles, factory floors), into one permissioned, machine-readable context and command layer.

Every company on IOI runs its own node. Nodes are secure, customer-owned, and private by default, and they connect to other nodes, autonomous systems, and hardware only with the owner's permission. Each node gives a company a searchable, AI-ready picture of its physical operations and a way to act on it.

We prove the protocol by running real applications on it. Juno, our AI agent, reasons over the network to price, coordinate, and execute work autonomously, and Oway Rideshare, the first service built on IOI, moves freight on trucks already traveling the right direction. More than 10,000 vehicles run on IOI today, and Fortune 500 companies and national logistics networks are connecting their operations to it. Trucks are the beginning. The same foundation lets factories coordinate production, robots discover and execute tasks, and autonomous fleets respond to demand.

We want to help American industry build more, move faster, and compete globally. We're backed by YC, General Catalyst, and leading investors in AI, industrials, and automation.

Founder Profile

Phillip, Oway's founder, co-founded Isotrex, a multinational defense manufacturer, with his brother at 16. He built its supply chain and production end to end, became CEO in 2019, and scaled it to roughly $100M in annual revenue and more than 4,000 vehicles built. Running factories showed him that the machines, systems, and companies of the physical economy have no common way to understand each other. He wrote "The Physical Economy Has No Index" and started Oway to build that common language.

About This 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

• By day 30: ship a production adapter that brings a new class of physical system, such as live fleet telemetry or a warehouse system, into IOI.
• By day 60: publish the next revision of IOI's core primitives and capability descriptors, with a reference implementation and a migration path.
• By day 90: 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.

Why Oway

How should a machine describe what it can do? How should an agent discover capacity and act on it with permission? How do you build one protocol that works across decades-old enterprise software and autonomous hardware? You'll answer those questions, and your answers will run real operations from day one.

About the interview

We try to run as fast as a process as possible.

1. Meet Phillip, the founder of Oway.
2. Meet our engineering leads. This is usually one or two people on one call.
3. Technical evaluation, details disclosed after step 2.

Note: We try to design the interview process pipeline to highlight each candidate’s skills. Thus, we might add an additional interview step if we deem necessary.

Oway was built by non-conventional thinkers who value diverse backgrounds and creative problem-solving. If you don't fit the mold perfectly, we still encourage you to apply.

About Oway

The physical economy still operates without a common language. Enterprise systems, factories, trucks, and robots generate enormous amounts of data, but most remains fragmented across legacy software and incompatible formats. Without a shared understanding of what is happening, even the most advanced AI cannot reliably coordinate how goods are made, moved, and delivered.

Oway is building that common language. Our protocol, IOI, connects enterprise systems and physical hardware, cleaning messy legacy data and live telemetry into a standardized schema that AI can understand and act on. Through a shared API, businesses can query their operations, identify inefficiencies, and automate actions across systems without replacing their existing software.

Our first model, Juno, applies this intelligence to unused truck capacity. It tracks empty space on trucks and sells it at a 50% discount to businesses shipping in the same direction. By moving freight directly on trucks already making the trip, Oway reduces shipping costs, damage, and transit times while generating additional revenue for carriers.

Every connected system and shipment expands our understanding of capacity, pricing, routes, facilities, and industrial operations. As this network grows, Oway is building toward a future where enterprise software, automated factories, self-driving vehicles, and robots can communicate and coordinate through one shared layer, making the physical economy programmable.