Help build the next generation of Zero Trust

The vision.

The first two generations of network security defended a perimeter, then centralized trust in cloud control planes that became the highest-value targets in the industry. Faction removes that dependency entirely: the owner holds the keys, and our infrastructure routes encrypted traffic it has no ability to read. Applied across networking, OT/IoT hardware, data, and AI, that single principle is the foundation of a platform built for the sectors that hold the nation’s digital infrastructure together — manufacturing, healthcare, energy, critical infrastructure, government, and financial services. The threat environment and the regulation are both moving in our direction, from the FCC’s action against foreign-made routers to the national reckoning over hardware and supply-chain integrity.

The engineering.

Zero-knowledge is a demanding and elegant constraint: you have to ship a seamless product while denying yourself any ability to see inside it. That discipline runs through a Rust cryptographic core, a four-layer encryption stack, owner-controlled PKI, and a distributed routing fabric — across every major platform, from phones and servers to embedded hardware in the field.

The AI frontier.

As AI agents begin acting at machine speed across networks, keeping a human in genuine, enforceable control of them becomes one of the defining problems of this decade — and a national-security problem, not just a commercial one. We believe the answer lives below the application layer, in cryptography, identity, and network architecture, where a kill switch actually works and an agent cannot manipulate and compromise cloud servers, software and vulnerable hardware to route around it.

The hardware frontier — Zero Trust to silicon.

You cannot outsource trust. Manufacturing in the United States is necessary but not sufficient; real assurance means continuous, independent verification of hardware, firmware, and components from the silicon up. We’re building toward exactly that — secure boot, cryptographic device identity, signed firmware, and controlled provisioning today, and Zero Trust principles embedded at the silicon level with post-quantum readiness as the destination. For engineers who work close to the metal — firmware, embedded, hardware security — this is a rare chance to solve a problem of real national consequence at a layer almost no one is defending.

• People who care about doing the right thing for customers, not just the easy thing.
• Curiosity and candor — we explain plainly and challenge each other directly.
• A bias for building things that are verifiable, not just impressive.