Rough Riders A six-month residency for exceptional engineers with the grit and determination to take on the toughest problems in American government.
The Great Undertaking The federal government operates more than 29,000 websites, with decades of systems, forms, and databases built without a common plan. Americans trying to get something done are left to make sense of it all themselves. It's time to drag this machinery out of the paper era and build the most superintelligent government services in the world.
Rough Riders is a six-month engineering residency run by the National Design Studio in partnership with Cognition. You'll work directly on the federal services hundreds of millions of Americans depend on most, taking on problems that have gone unsolved for decades.
Engineering Stakes A veteran waiting for benefits, a student applying for financial aid, or a grandmother enrolling in Medicare should have the full force of American ingenuity working in their favor. Behind every broken process is a real person whose time and livelihood matter. Solve one problem here and your work can reach millions of your fellow Americans.
Civilizational Scale The government already holds much of the information it repeatedly asks Americans to provide. Its largest systems were built generations apart, often in incompatible languages and architectures. Connecting them means confronting decades of technical debt across hundreds of agencies and some of the largest datasets in the world.
A Startup in Government The National Design Studio runs like a startup inside the federal government. We have little patience for bureaucracy, endless meetings, or work that never leaves a slide deck. Engineers here speak their minds, make decisions, and ship, ship, ship. Work that once took years can go live this week, immediately improving the lives of millions of Americans.
Dare to Be Great We're looking for people of uncommon intelligence and resolve who welcome really hard work, long days, late nights, exercise sound judgment, and can be trusted to finish what they start. The assignment will demand everything you've learned and much of what you have yet to learn.
The next 250 years of American progress will be shaped by what we build today. We are recruiting the engineers who will build it.
