Join the Movement
This is for about forty people a year.
We hire for principle first, portfolio second, pedigree third. Small team, senior only, named accountability on every engagement. If you want to be the most junior person in the room, this is the wrong room — and we mean that as information, not as a boast.
- Senior-only
- Remote-first
- Compensation published
- Everyone publishes
The gate
Six criteria.
Written to be failed. If three of these are not you, the rest of this page will waste your afternoon.
Criterion 1 of 6
- 01
You have shipped something that is still running.
Not a prototype that impressed someone. A system with users, on-call, and a year of scars.
- 02
You write.
Not well, necessarily — but habitually. We are an async team; an unwritten decision did not happen.
- 03
You have changed your mind in public.
About a technology, a pattern, a project you championed. If you have never done this, you have either been right every time or you have not been paying attention.
- 04
You can hold a position under pressure from someone more senior.
Including us. Principle 03 is worthless if only the founders can exercise it.
- 05
You would rather own a small thing completely than a large thing partly.
No pyramid means no one to hand the hard part to.
- 06
You are uncomfortable being the smartest person in the room.
Because you will not be, and we hire specifically so that stays true.
If you read six criteria and thought “that’s a lot of hoops” — genuinely, no hard feelings. If you read six criteria and thought “finally” — keep going.
How we work
Operational truth, not a culture deck.
Async by default
Meetings need an agenda and a written outcome. A meeting that could have been a document costs six people an hour each, and we count that.
Written decisions
Every consequential choice gets a short decision record: what we chose, what we rejected, and what would make us change our minds.
Named ownership
Every engagement has one accountable principal. Not a committee. Their name is in the SOW and on the readout.
Opinion-having is the job
We hired you for judgment. “I’ll do whatever you think” is the one answer that doesn’t help.
No pyramid
There is no one below you to hand the hard part to. This is the single biggest difference from a holdco, and it is not for everyone.
Rest is operational
On-call rotations are staffed so nobody carries the pager twice in a row. Burnout is a delivery risk before it is anything else.
What you get
Stated, not hinted.
A senior candidate reads a careers page for what it refuses to say. So here is the list, in the order people actually ask.
- Compensation
- Published bands per level and region. Reviewed annually against market data we will show you.
- Equity
- Offered at every level, with the strike price, the current 409A, and the dilution model explained before you sign.
- Location
- Remote-first. Core overlap hours stated per role, and an office for those who want one.
- Time off
- A stated minimum, not an “unlimited” policy that quietly means zero.
- Learning
- An annual budget, plus the publishing expectation below — which is itself the best professional development we know of.
- Hardware
- Your choice, refreshed on a stated cycle.
- Parental leave
- Stated in weeks, identical regardless of who gave birth.
The bands themselves are published on each open role rather than here, because a band without a level attached is marketing. If a role is listed without one, that is a bug — tell us and we will fix it the same day.
Open roles
Nothing open this quarter.
That is usually temporary and rarely a good reason to wait — send an open application below and we will tell you honestly where you’d sit and when.
We hire about forty people a year against a list of six criteria, which means the gap between roles is often weeks rather than quarters. The applications we come back to first are the ones already in the drawer.
Expected to open
- Staff Engineer, AI SystemsStaff · Engineering · Remote-first
- Principal Product DesignerPrincipal · Design · Remote-first
- Engagement StrategistSenior · Strategy · Remote-first
These are not listed as open because their compensation bands are not finalised, and we do not publish a role without one. When the band is set, the role appears here with it.
The open application
Senior people rarely fit a job description.
If none of the above is you but the six criteria were, write to us. Tell us one thing you shipped that is still running, and one thing you were wrong about. Two paragraphs is plenty. A named principal replies within one business day — the same promise we make to clients.
Four fields, because every extra one filters out good candidates faster than bad ones. No cover letter, no CV upload, no “tell us about a time when”.
Sent.
[Named principal] will reply by Tuesday 10 November.
This form is not yet connected to a mailbox. Until it is, write to us directly and we will treat it as an application — the same reply promise applies.
Publishing expectation
Everyone here publishes.
Engineers, designers, strategists — everyone writes for Insights & Innovation, under their own byline, at least quarterly. Not ghostwritten, not approved by marketing, not signed off by a founder. It is the clearest signal we know of that the thinking is distributed rather than concentrated at the top.
Bylines are placeholders until the essays are published. Every piece will carry the name of the person who wrote it and no one else’s.
Still reading?
Then you are probably one of the forty. Send the open application — two paragraphs, one link, and a named principal reads it.
The Usool Method
- Principle
- Pattern
- Prototype
- Production
- Proof