Schema Labs (OpenCouncil) | Civic Tech Software Engineer | Athens, Greece | Hybrid (3 days in office) | €55K-65K
We're a 4-person non-profit building OpenCouncil (https://opencouncil.gr), an AI platform that makes Greek municipal council meetings accessible to citizens. We take hours-long council sessions and turn them into searchable, per-topic video clips, SMS/email notifications, and speaker analytics.
Stack: TypeScript, Next.js, React, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch. Heavy use of LLMs for transcription, speaker ID, and turning unstructured PDFs/transcripts into structured data. We use Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools daily.
Looking for: 2+ years experience, strong web dev skills, genuine interest in civic tech. Bonus if you're strong in either data engineering/LLM integration or frontend/UX. Must be based in (or willing to relocate to) Athens, fluent in Greek and English.
We offer up to 30% annual profit sharing, lunch on office days, and up to 3 days/week remote. Small team, high ownership, real impact.
We don't want to replace all interviewing. We won't test for culture fit, or presentation skills (although we can test for some industry-specific knowledge and communication skills). You can think of it as technical screening stage.
We don't want to serve non-hardware companies that are hiring their first hardware engineers. We want to serve companies of all sizes (including startups) that are building products that are so critical that they can't waste their senior engineers' time to do 10-20 technical interviews a week. These customers will care a lot about their hardware engineers.
Yes, our customers should do more interviewing for candidates that pass the Touvlo interview. We think that our service should be primarily a technical screening before the company invests more in additional interviewing, but you're free to use it for at any step of your recruiting process. There is also more to evaluate in a potential hire than technical skills (for example, cultural match).
> Why did I spend 4 years in engineering school, and build my professional track record, yet have to keep doing these negging tests? Does this company not employ anyone who can get a sense of a fellow engineer's skill and professionalism just by talking with them? Did they read my resume? And now they're not even administering the test themselves?
There's two parts to this:
(1) On one hand, the interview should never feel like a negging test and the interview of a graduate should be completely different from the interview of a senior engineer with 5+ years of experience. And if you are extremely senior with an amazing professional track record, then perhaps no technical interviewing is necessary at all.
(2) On the other hand, no one should feel offended for having to do a technical interview that matches their seniority and experience. It's outsourced to a third party company, because we can do it better and faster. Candidates will be happier, because they can interview outside business hours (incl. weekends) and have a positive experience. Also, the alternative in many cases is that the company won't bother interviewing the candidate at all, or worse, they might send a take-home test that takes hours to 100 candidates and then spend 0-3 minutes reviewing each.
Currently a job-seeker can not get their report card sent to multiple employers, however this is a good idea to consider after getting to a certain scale. At that point, we would essentially become the standard in hardware technical interviewing. Figuring out a fair payment model would be one of the challenges.
Thank you - we think we’re at least 10x better than a non-technical recruiter (also because they have completely different incentives).
These reservations are fair. Hopefully, eventually we’ll have enough endorsements and references to give you some confidence. If you’d like to give us a try before then, happy to talk whenever at [email protected]!
We don’t do cultural fit at all, and we don’t intend to. I agree this is very important, yet very difficult and inefficient to outsource. We don’t aim to replace all interviewing: becoming a better substitute for early-stage technical screening is more than enough.
Thank you, this is good feedback. We’re both native greek speakers, and we meant it in a lighthearted way, but you’re right that not everyone will see it this way.
You’re absolutely our target market! You’re not delegating the decision, you’re delegating the interviewing. We don’t make a decision, we give you a video and scorecard of a one hour technical interview. You can integrate our interviews at any stage in your pipeline (e.g instead of a phone screen), and do more interviewing for those that do well. Please note that this is common in software, see karat.com.
Yes, we can use any CAD software (or at least, we will seriously consider it). We’re a new company and following the YC advice of doing things that don’t scale. If that means buying 5 different software licenses for our first 5 customers, then we’ll do that.
That’s a good point regarding hardware in the name. Eventually we’d like to do all hardware and more (e.g. architecture), but currently our expertise is in mechanical and robotics engineering.
Our pitch: We make recruiting easier, better and cheaper for the companies building the hardware of tomorrow, by letting them focus on their product rather than repetitive candidate skill assessments. Currently, senior engineers in small startups and scale ups spend a lot of their time interviewing, and they often don’t do it well (remote CAD sessions aren’t really a thing). We save them time and money.
We will scale this by hiring freelancer interview engineers. This has already been done in software, very successfully: karat.com. So we think it can work at least equally well in hardware.
This is onshape indeed, but we run a collaborative VNC (soon-to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run anything that runs on Windows (so everything).
I've spent a lot of time flying on VATSIM/IVAO, and some time controlling. I also eventually got my real-world Private Pilot License.
VATSIM is an amazing community and the quality of the ATC service offered is incredibly high. It definitely helped a lot with becoming more comfortable with using the radio as a real world student pilot. I also expect that it will help me with my instrument license once I decide to do it.
A taxiway that goes under a runway would require large, long inclines and declines. An A320 is ~12m tall, and with a 5% incline/decline (which is very large) you'd require 480m of horizontal distance in incline/decline, which sounds like a lot. And some airplanes are two times as tall as the A320, and with some margins added, it's probably safe to guess that an underground passing would require airplanes to taxi hundreds of additional meters to pass through the tunnel.
Airplanes burn a lot of fuel when taxiing, and taxi very slowly. So it's likely an expense, time and space constraint.
We're a 4-person non-profit building OpenCouncil (https://opencouncil.gr), an AI platform that makes Greek municipal council meetings accessible to citizens. We take hours-long council sessions and turn them into searchable, per-topic video clips, SMS/email notifications, and speaker analytics.
We're live with 10 municipalities including Athens, and the project is open source: https://github.com/schemalabz/opencouncil
Stack: TypeScript, Next.js, React, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch. Heavy use of LLMs for transcription, speaker ID, and turning unstructured PDFs/transcripts into structured data. We use Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools daily.
Looking for: 2+ years experience, strong web dev skills, genuine interest in civic tech. Bonus if you're strong in either data engineering/LLM integration or frontend/UX. Must be based in (or willing to relocate to) Athens, fluent in Greek and English.
We offer up to 30% annual profit sharing, lunch on office days, and up to 3 days/week remote. Small team, high ownership, real impact.
Details & apply: https://schemalabs.gr/jobs/civic-tech-software-engineer