Open roles
Careers
Every position below is unpaid, because the institute has no funding and we would rather say that at the top than at the bottom. Compensation is a named role at an institute that will, at minimum, never be acquired.
Head of Angle
Own the production angle end to end. Verify it physically, at least quarterly, with an instrument that does not round. Report drift immediately and without rounding it yourself. This role reports to the Director of Angle, who also holds this role, and who is looking to delegate it because holding both has become difficult to defend in writing.
You must be able to read a protractor under pressure. Experience with masonry is not required but is, based on 2026, increasingly relevant.
Off-Diagonal Ethicist
Field the recurring question of where the discarded data went and develop the institute’s formal position on why the question is malformed. Our current answer — that off-diagonal cells were never occupied, so asking where they went is like asking where the number between 3 and 4 went — is philosophically sound and has not once satisfied anyone who asked.
The successful candidate will be comfortable being correct and unpersuasive at the same time, for years.
Benchmark Integrity Officer
Read our benchmark results and tell us, in writing, exactly how dishonest they are. We already disclose that we wrote the benchmark, the system, and the workload. We suspect there is a further layer of self-deception underneath that disclosure and we cannot see it from in here.
This role has adversarial authority over the Standards Committee. The Standards Committee has agreed to this in principle and will be difficult about it in practice.
Second Protractor Operator
Independently verify the angle using the second protractor. Critical detail: you must not be the person holding the first protractor. During the March incident we verified drift twice using one instrument and recorded it as independent confirmation. It was not.
The entire qualification is being a different person than the first operator. We have not filled this role, which means we are still, technically, verifying nothing.
IANA Correspondent
Send the email. Draft 4 exists. Draft 4 is shorter than draft 1. Nobody here can bring themselves to press send, because sending it converts this from a research program into a claim on a registry that has procedures.
Must be willing to press send. That is the whole role. We have discussed it at length and cannot get past it.
How to apply
There is no application form. Write to us with an objection to RFC-D45 that we have not already recorded in §7.1.
That is the whole process. We are not being coy — an objection we have not thought of is the single scarcest resource this institute has, and anyone who produces one has demonstrated the only skill any of these roles requires.
What it is like here
Nothing fails, because nothing is asked of the system, and we are increasingly aware that those are one fact rather than two.
The work is unfalsifiable and we compensate by being unusually strict about the parts that are not. The angle is verified physically. The benchmark methodology is disclosed in its first paragraph. The dissent is recorded permanently in the specification it dissents from.
If that sounds like a reasonable way to spend an evening, you will fit in immediately.