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A small studio building contemplative software. If something below looks like the room you want to be in, send an application — every one comes straight to my inbox.
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Founding Engineer · The Sacred Act
Help me build the meditation app I'd actually want to use, from iOS to backend to AI prompting.
Full-time·Remote · US-aligned hours·Competitive base + meaningful equity
Posted May 13, 2026Read more →Close ↑Who I'm looking for
Someone who has shipped real products on small teams, who cares about how an app feels in the hand, and who would rather build one thing slowly and well than ten things fast and forgotten.
You don’t need ten years of experience. You need taste, calm, and the kind of seriousness that doesn’t need an audience to maintain.
What you'd work on
- The iOS app (SwiftUI + a tiny native bridge layer)
- The Bun + Hono backend that wraps AI meditation generation
- The contemplative prompt engineering itself — the AI is the practice's voice; we treat it as a discipline
- Whatever needs building. We’re small. Boundaries between “product” and “engineering” are mostly fictional here.
What I’ll bring
- A product I’ve been building with care for a year
- Funding to make this a real role
- A practice — I sit every day, I read the source material, and the app is shaped by it
- Honest taste — I’ll tell you when I think a direction is wrong, and I’ll want the same from you
What I won’t do
- Run a 9-to-5 with mandatory standups
- Build for engagement metrics
- Pretend the work matters more or less than it does
If this sounds like the kind of room you want to be in, send an application.
Apply
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PhD Researcher · Contemplative Neuroscience
Lead a real study on how The Sacred Act's AI-generated meditations affect the brain. Design, measure, publish.
Research fellowship · project-based·Remote · US/EU aligned · in-person where instrumentation requires·Project fellowship + meaningful equity
Posted May 18, 2026Read more →Close ↑Who I'm looking for
Someone with a PhD in neuroscience, cognitive science, or experimental psychology, with a real research history in contemplative practice. Not dabbling in mindfulness as a side interest. Someone whose work has actually measured what sitting does to the brain.
Published research in the field matters more than seniority. Whether your line of work is default-mode-network suppression, attentional regulation, interoception, HRV-and-meditation, or oscillatory EEG signatures of advanced practice — what I'm looking for is somebody who already knows the literature and can write a study into it.
You should also be willing to design and run one rigorous study end-to-end, not supervise from a distance.
What you'd work on
- Designing a controlled study on how The Sacred Act's AI-generated meditations affect the brain — against teacher-led practice, silent baseline, or whatever comparison the question actually demands.
- Choosing the instrumentation honestly. High-density EEG, HRV, possibly 7T fMRI if a partner lab aligns. CRED-NF-grade preregistration, sample-size justification, blinding, artifact handling. No shortcuts on rigor because the result needs to stand up to a Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience review.
- Pairing first-person reports with neural data — neurophenomenology, not surveys glued onto a scan. The lived practice is part of the measurement.
- Recruiting participants, running sessions, analyzing data, and writing the paper. Publishing in a real peer-reviewed venue is the bar.
What I'll bring
- A meditation app actively used by TestFlight users, generating practice data the study can ground in.
- Full access to the corpus, the prompting layer, and the underlying AI behavior — the study won't be operating on a black box. You'll see the same generation traces I see.
- Funding for the study itself, plus equity that ties the finding to the company that backed it.
- A founder who already meditates daily and reads the source material, so the conversation with you isn't a translation exercise.
What I won't do
- Treat contemplative neuroscience as a branding move.
- Push you to publish before the data justifies it, or to soften a finding because it doesn't market well.
- Pretend I want results. If the model doesn't do anything measurable — or worse, if it does something measurably wrong — I want to know first.
If you've thought seriously about what AI-generated practice means for the science of meditation, write to me with one paragraph on what you'd actually want to measure first, and what instrument you'd reach for.
Apply
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PhD Scholar · Eastern Philosophy & Contemplative Texts
Review the corpus of meditation techniques The Sacred Act draws on, and flag where convenience has eroded the source.
Research fellowship · project-based·Remote · time-zone flexible·Project fellowship + meaningful equity
Posted May 18, 2026Read more →Close ↑Who I'm looking for
Someone with a PhD in religious studies, Buddhist studies, contemplative studies, or comparative philosophy — and deep reading in classical contemplative texts. Reading ability in at least one of Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, or Classical Japanese, in a tradition you've actually published on. Broader range welcome, not required.
You hold both halves of the work at once: scholarly precision and lived seriousness. You've studied the texts and you've sat with them. You can tell when sati has been collapsed into "mindfulness" and lost the recollection-and-discernment that made it sati in the first place. You can name the missing half. You can read where convenience or marketing has eroded the source, and you care enough to say so.
You've also read the existing critique. Iwamura's Virtual Orientalism, the Buddhist-studies arguments that contemporary meditation apps fuel exactly the dispositions traditional practice was meant to dissolve. The role exists because I want that critique inside the project, not outside it.
What you'd work on
- Reviewing the corpus of meditation techniques the AI generates from — line by line where it matters. Flagging misattributions, syncretic blendings that compromise integrity, oversimplifications, and any place a technique has been stripped from its ethical or relational context.
- Recommending additions. Where are we silent on a tradition that should be in the corpus? Where are we leaning too hard on one school and underrepresenting others?
- Writing short lineage notes — a paragraph or two per technique — that ground each practice in the texts it actually comes from. These inform the prompts the AI runs against, and may eventually become a public archive on the site.
- Helping me see what not to do. Where would a technique we're tempted by actively betray the tradition it comes from, and what would the alternative be?
What I'll bring
- The full corpus of techniques, the system prompts the AI uses to compose meditations from them, and the freedom to mark anything in either for revision.
- A real openness to changing direction when the texts say something different than what the marketing wants to hear. I'd rather ship a smaller, honest product than a wide, syncretic one.
- Equity in the company building this, so the lineage you defend is also a lineage you have a stake in.
What I won't do
- Use your work as appropriation cover. If we shouldn't be drawing from a tradition the way we are, I want to hear it and act on it, not have your name on a footnote about it.
- Reduce the review to a checkbox or a one-time pass. The corpus is the spine of the product, and the conversation is the work.
- Pretend AI translation is a substitute for scholarship, or that a system prompt can do what a teacher does.
If you've taught or published on classical contemplative texts, send a short note with one practice in the current meditation-app market you think is most misrepresented, and what it would take to get it right.
Apply
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Designer-Engineer · Apple Platforms
Build The Sacred Act across iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac widgets. Swift-native, taste-led, designer and engineer in one head.
Full-time·Remote · US-aligned hours·Competitive base + meaningful equity
Posted May 18, 2026Read more →Close ↑Who I'm looking for
A designer who codes, or an engineer who designs — the line doesn't matter. What matters is that you can hold the whole experience in your head: the way a glance complication should feel on the wrist, the way a widget rests on a Mac desktop, the way the iPhone app breathes in the hand. And you can build it yourself in Swift.
You're fluent in Swift and SwiftUI. You've shipped a real iOS app to production — not a course project. You know Apple's Human Interface Guidelines well enough to know when to follow them and when the practice we're building demands a quieter, slower deviation. You probably have opinions about haptics, motion curves, and font metrics, and you can defend those opinions in code reviews.
Bonus: production experience with WidgetKit, watchOS complications, Live Activities, ActivityKit, Liquid Glass, or whatever recent Apple surface has caught your attention. Bonus on top of bonus: you've built something cross-Apple-platform before and the three surfaces actually felt like one product.
What you'd work on
- The iOS app itself — its motion, its haptics, the way each meditation arrives, holds, and ends.
- An Apple Watch app and complication that turns a wristwatch into a quiet reminder to practice — not another notification source. The point is to return attention, not interrupt it.
- Mac widgets that sit at the edge of the desktop the way a candle sits at the edge of a room: present, never insistent.
- The design system that ties all three surfaces together. The Sacred Act needs to feel like one thing across three devices, not three apps with a shared logo.
What I'll bring
- A real product in TestFlight, with users who care and a private community of testers shaping every release.
- A founding engineer to pair with on the boundary between native Swift and the Bun + Hono backend that wraps the AI meditation generation.
- A design language still being shaped — your taste will set its tone for years across iPhone, Watch, and Mac. There is no design team to defer to, and no committee.
- Equity that makes the surfaces you design and ship feel partly yours, because they will be.
What I won't do
- Ask you to ship before the surface feels right. We move slowly on the parts that matter.
- Bury your name behind a generic "engineering" credit. Designer-engineers deserve to be seen as both.
- Build for engagement metrics or compete with the attention economy. The product is meant to return attention to the visitor, not capture it.
If you can show me an Apple surface you've shipped that you're genuinely proud of — and one place in a currently shipping iOS app where you think the design has betrayed the calm it was meant to carry — send an application.
Apply
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No applicant tracking system. No automated rejection emails. Every application gets read by me, and I try to reply even when it’s a no.