Andy Schwab

Operations & Trust

Consultant - Operational Design & Trust Infrastructure at Independent Practice

I work on operational practice and trust infrastructure. The same question runs through both: how do systems coordinate when interests differ, authority is distributed, and adversaries (including AI actors) may outnumber real participants by orders of magnitude.

On the operational side, this involves leading teams, managing processes, and designing the substrates that enable autonomy without chaos. I also advise community-led organizations on operating models and patterns.

On the trust infrastructure side, I'm developing Agency Graphs, a framework that treats identity as composite, trust as probabilistic, and roles as emergent rather than assigned. I'm applying it to moderation, trust, and team building in distributed communities, including the case for rebuilding authentication in environments saturated by AI actors.

Other work includes leading a VC-backed startup, US Army OCS command, tech leadership across venture and nonprofit, advisory work on gubernatorial technology committees, publishing on trust and IT management, and teaching in higher education.

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Career: 14

Consultant - Operational Design & Trust Infrastructure

Independent Practice

GB · Remote

Apr 2026 - Present

Working at the intersection of operational practice and trust infrastructure. Operational design: advising and supporting mission-aligned organizations on operating model design, particularly where the work is to enable autonomy at scale. Trust infrastructure: Continuing development of the Agency Graphs framework, a design approach to composite identity and probabilistic trust in decentralized systems. Current focus: applying the framework to adversarial AI environments and moderation challenges in ATProto-based systems.

Founder & CEO

Sodal

Feb 2024 - May 2026

Building open tools to make digital collaboration faster and safer for everyone.

Security Engineer

Protocol Labs

Jan 2023 - Mar 2024

Researched, designed, developed, and deployed novel identity and security solutions for distributed teams. Focus was on enabling greater speed and safety for people working together outside of a traditional business hierarchy, including open source development projects, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and cross-startup collaborations involving thousands of independent participating entities.

Owner, CTO

Unus Cygnus

Mar 2021 - Sep 2023

Employed decentralized, permissionless systems to preserve public data of civic and scientific value. This included instantiating a datacenter serving more than 1PiB of cryptographically verified, publicly accessible data from NASA Earth Exchange, Smithsonian Open Access, NASA Terra Fusion, NOAA NEXRAD, and other open data initiatives.

Startup Engineer

Protocol Labs

Jan 2020 - Dec 2022

Directed technology operations for a globally distributed organization; led a team responsible for security, systems, and support in a fast-paced startup environment.

Director (Major)

Army National Guard

Oct 2018 - Sep 2021

Director (Commander) of the Officer Candidate School, Georgia Army National Guard.

Assistant Professor

New Hampshire Technical Institute

Jan 2017 - Jan 2020

Responsible for course development, instruction, and student services within the Software Development degree program, as well as departmental, student community, and governance activities.

Operations Manager (Captain)

Army National Guard

May 2014 - Oct 2018

Roles included Company Commander, Senior Platoon Trainer, and Operations Officer.

Head of Technology

Global Nonprofit

Mar 2013 - Jan 2017

Built a strong technical team, simplified and unified processes, improved technology integration, and increased collaboration and security across the organization.

Section Manager (Lieutenant)

Army National Guard

May 2009 - May 2014

Roles included Platoon Leader, Public Affairs Officer, and Planning Officer. Conducted training and operations in the US, Southern Command, and Southwest Asia.

Datacenter Administrator

United States Department of Defense

Concord, NH

Sep 2011 - Mar 2013

Deployed and maintained critical finance and administrative systems, network services, virtualization infrastructure, and customer support services in an Enterprise environment.

Owner

Schwab Communications

Feb 2008 - Jan 2012

Provided technology consulting, infrastructure support, and web development services for SMBs.

Supervisor (Sergeant)

Army National Guard

New Hampshire

Sep 2005 - May 2009

Served in roles of increasing responsibility with a focus on developing others to perform complex tasks in challenging environments, including Broadcast Section Leader for a military Public Affairs team.