About the role

Connect the world's largest industrial companies to IOI, and automate what they run.

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 take an enterprise from kickoff to a live IOI node, then put that node to work. You'll sit with IT, operations, and supply chain teams, map their ERP, warehouse, transportation, and sensor data into IOI's primitives, and build the automations that replace their manual coordination. Then you'll turn what you learned into connectors and playbooks so every next deployment goes faster.

You'll work with Phillip, our engineering leads, and our enterprise commercial team.

Your First 90 Days

• By day 30: ship a production integration that brings a major enterprise or fleet system into IOI, and know our primitives and node architecture cold.
• By day 60: lead an IOI node deployment from discovery to production, with the first automated workflow live for that customer.
• By day 90: own the technical relationship for two or three enterprises, and ship a reusable connector for a system you've now integrated more than once.

What You'll Do

• Deploy IOI nodes. Connect ERP, WMS, TMS, MES, and telemetry sources to customer-owned nodes in the cloud.
• Translate operations into primitives. Model a company's inventory, facilities, assets, and flows in IOI's common language.
• Automate industrial stacks. Find the manual coordination hiding in an operation and replace it with agent-driven workflows on IOI.
• Build what's missing. Write production-quality connectors, transforms, and EDI and API integrations.
• Be the customer's engineer. Run technical discovery, scope work, and earn trust with IT and operations leaders.
• Feed the protocol. Bring field insight back to the IOI and applications teams, and turn repeated work into product.

Skills You'll Need

• Hands-on integration with enterprise systems: ERP (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle), WMS (Manhattan, Blue Yonder), TMS (Oracle OTM, MercuryGate, or similar), or MES.
• EDI X12 (204, 210, 214, 856, 990) and transport methods such as AS2 and SFTP.
• REST and SOAP APIs, webhooks, and authentication schemes used in enterprise environments.
• Data mapping, ETL/ELT pipelines, and strong SQL.
• Production code in Java or TypeScript, plus Python for scripting and data work.
• Cloud deployment and infrastructure as code (Azure, Terraform).
• Technical discovery, scoping, and clear written documentation for customer stakeholders.

Nice to have: industrial telemetry protocols (MQTT, OPC UA); fleet telematics platforms (Samsara, Motive); workflow automation and LLM agent tooling; supply chain consulting or solutions engineering; manufacturing or warehouse operations experience.

Who You Are

• 4+ years of production engineering, with significant customer-facing or implementation time.
• You stay calm in a room of skeptical IT architects and leave with a plan everyone agrees to.
• You like being the person who makes it actually work, on site if that's what it takes.
• You see patterns across deployments and want to turn them into product.

Why Oway

Every node you deploy makes a company's physical operations visible and programmable, often for the first time. You'll see the inside of how America's largest companies make and move goods, and you'll help define how they connect to everything else.

About the interview

About the Interview

We move fast and design each step to show off what you're best at.

1. Meet Phillip, Oway's founder.
2. Meet our engineering leads, usually one call with one or two people.
3. A technical evaluation built around a real integration scenario, with details shared after step two.

We may add a step if it helps us see your strengths more clearly.

Oway was built by unconventional thinkers. We value diverse backgrounds, independent judgment, and creative problem-solving. If this mission excites you and you've built things you're proud of, apply even if you don't check every box.

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.