Quantitative Researcher, IOI Index

Build the first real-time index of the physical economy.

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.

About the Founder

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

The price of physical capacity is still set by phone calls, stale rate tables, and guesswork. You'll build the index that changes that. When Juno finds open space on a truck already headed from Dallas to Houston, your models decide what that space is worth, how likely a shipper is to book it, and how likely the carrier is to accept, all within seconds. Every quote, win, and loss flows back into the index and makes it sharper.

Freight is the first market. Over time the same index will price warehouse space, production capacity, and work for autonomous systems. You'll work directly with Phillip and our engineering leads, and you'll own pricing from research through production.

Your First 90 Days

• By day 30: ship an improvement to the production pricing model, such as freight-class-aware pricing or better coverage on sparse short-haul lanes, measured on live win rate.
• By day 60: build the evaluation and backtesting framework for the index: win rate, margin, and carrier acceptance by lane, benchmarked against market rates.
• By day 90: own the next-generation index architecture, including how prices form on lanes with little history, how the model learns from every quote outcome, and how it extends to capacity beyond trucks.

What You'll Do

• Model the market. Price capacity from quotes, conversions, carrier acceptance, telemetry, and market rate data.
• Optimize the trade-off. Balance win probability and margin together, with well-calibrated uncertainty.
• Solve cold start. Price new lanes and regions with little or no history by learning across geography, freight class, and equipment.
• Close the loop. Design the experiments and feedback systems that let the index learn from every outcome.
• Ship to production. Serve prices within tight latency budgets inside live rate APIs, and monitor for drift and data failures.
• Extend the index. Generalize pricing from freight to other forms of physical capacity on IOI.

Skills You'll Need

• Probabilistic and Bayesian modeling, with a focus on calibrated uncertainty.
• Pricing, auction, or market microstructure modeling: demand curves, win probability, elasticity, and bid optimization.
• Machine learning for tabular and time-series data (gradient boosting, GLMs, neural models).
• Causal inference and experiment design, including bandits or A/B testing in live markets.
• Strong Python (NumPy, pandas or polars, scikit-learn, PyTorch) and SQL.
• Production model deployment: low-latency inference, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining pipelines.
• Geospatial and network data modeling.

Nice to have: quantitative trading or market making; marketplace pricing in rideshare, delivery, freight, or ad auctions; operations research and integer programming; reinforcement learning; Java; freight rate data (SMC3, DAT).

Who You Are

• 4+ years building pricing, forecasting, or trading models that ran in production with real money on the line. Relevant PhD research counts.
• An advanced degree in a quantitative field is a plus.
• You obsess over calibration and backtests, and you know the ways a model can fool you.
• You explain model behavior clearly to engineers and to commercial teams.
• You want your models to move real goods.

Why Oway

You'll build the first index of the physical economy from the ground up, with live quote data and more than 10,000 vehicles on the network. The work starts with freight and grows into pricing every form of physical capacity, laying the foundation for forward markets in the physical economy.

Interview Process

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 modeling exercise on an anonymized quote dataset, 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.