Founding Engineer

Schism Labs

May 21, 2025

09:45 PM

Schism Labs

Company size : 2-10 employees
Job Type & Title : Remote
Apply Now
About Company:
Schism Labs is building the Context Protocol: a privacy-first, cross-platform infrastructure that makes miscommunication visible, preventable, and repairable. Like TCP/IP standardized data exchange, the Context Protocol standardizes how emotional, cognitive, and cultural signals travel with digital communication—so people can better understand and be understood across platforms, identities, and contexts. Our Approach: - Protocol, not product: Creating a new interoperability layer like HTTP for human meaning - Perspective-only AI: We illuminate multiple interpretations, never correct - Privacy-first architecture: Context lives locally; nothing is shared without consent - Difference-affirming by design: Built for neurodivergence, cross-cultural teams, and relational complexity Miscommunication costs U.S. businesses $1.2 trillion annually ($12,500 per employee) and causes unquantified emotional labor, burnout, and relational rupture. Schism resolves this systemic failure by embedding context awareness into communication workflows, enabling clarity without conformity and trust without surveillance. We're building for the future of work and human connection—a world where being misunderstood is no longer inevitable, but repairable. Founded with lived experience of communication challenges in high-performance, high-context environments, Schism is built from necessity, not theory.
Skills:

Location: Remote-first (US)

Type: Equity + TBD Salary | Co-Founder Potential

Company: Schism (Pre-Seed)

*This is a high-impact, early-stage equity role. Full-time preferred, but we’re open to part-time engagement during prototyping—especially if you’re the right systems thinker. Depending on fit and availability, what matters most is technical ownership, values alignment, and shared commitment.

What We're Building

Schism is building the Context Protocol—a consent-first, privacy-preserving infrastructure layer that prevents digital miscommunication by making emotional, cognitive, and cultural context machine-readable and ethically shareable across platforms.

What You'll Own

You’ll be the technical anchor, designing and building the first version of Schism from the ground up. This is not “just an app”—it’s protocol-level infrastructure.

Core Responsibilities:

Architect and build a local-first system using CRDTs, end-to-end encryption, and minimal cloud infrastructure
Implement an on-device nudging engine (using lightweight ML or hybrid rule-based approaches)
Develop browser extensions and overlays for Slack, Gmail, Zoom, etc.
Design and prototype Self-Context Cards, dynamic status signals, and context-sharing protocols
Co-own the technical roadmap and hiring plan for future engineers
Collaborate closely with the founder and multidisciplinary research advisors (AI ethics, neurodiversity, cross-cultural comms)

Ideal Experience

We don’t care about fancy degrees. We care about architecture-level thinking, privacy conviction, and excitement for early-stage invention.

You might be or have:

Built (or deeply contributed to) a privacy-first app, browser extension, protocol, or federated system
Deep experience with local-first data, P2P sync, or edge ML
A hacker’s mindset, with the rigor to build safe, scalable systems
Familiarity with decentralized identity, CRDTs, or protocol design
Comfort designing MVPs with high technical uncertainty
Clear written thinker who can document and simplify the complex
Preferably experienced in mission-aligned, consent-first or open-source projects

What We're Offering

Founding equity
A voice in every strategic and architectural decision
Room to shape a new category
Pilot-ready demand from trusted community orgs and early-stage companies
Funding pipeline
Deep alignment with ethical tech, neurodivergence, and systems justice

India Abroad® and New India Abroad®, publications of Indian Star LLC, are primarily meant to keep the Global Indian Diaspora informed about what is happening in India, the world and in their own neighborhoods through digital platforms, and print publications.