Become a System Hacker.
The lab is now; the party comes later. A hundred people is the legal threshold to register a political party in India, our first test bed, and that hundred will be drawn from the lab. Clear the curriculum, contribute, and be one of them.
Domain experts
Ten years or more of hands-on work in something a country cannot do without: aviation, software, defence, medicine, finance, infrastructure, teaching, farming. Not ten years of having views about it. Ten years inside it.
Proof, not credentials
A degree tells us where you sat. We want problems you have closed, the constraints you were under, and the parts that went wrong. Working in the open is a condition of entry: reasoning you cannot show is not evidence.
Peer-reviewed
You send a portfolio. People already in your domain read it. Then a conversation about a hard problem in your field, and a check on background and conflicts. Nobody gets in by knowing someone, and that includes knowing us.
Build the system
Specifications, not position papers. Take one mechanism in your domain, set out what it is meant to do and what it does instead, propose something testable. Then read other people's and say plainly where they are wrong.
Where the system needs you
Every one of these is currently regulated by people who have never operated it.
Runways, rails and ports
Pilots, controllers and safety engineers. Signalling and track. Port operations, logistics planning, maritime engineering. The failure modes here are technical and the inquiries into them are written by lawyers.
The stack underneath
System architects, people who have carried a pager for something large, incident responders, cryptographers, telecom engineers, and the ML people honest about what their models cannot do. Rules in this area are written years behind the thing they govern.
Health, learning, money, food
Public health specialists. People who have designed a curriculum and then taught it. Economists who have watched a mechanism meet the real distribution of income. Agricultural scientists and the people who move what they grow. Small design errors here compound into a generation.
Send us your portfolio
Tell us what you have built or fixed, and what you would change if the rules in your field were yours to write. We read all of it.
Apply by email →Application template
- Your domain, and how long you have worked in it
- Three to five problems you have closed, including what went wrong
- Anything public: papers, patents, systems in production, incidents you handled
- One thing your field gets wrong that an outsider would never spot
- The rule you would rewrite first, and what you would measure to know it worked