A services firm is its people. Whatever the website says, the actual quality a client receives is the quality of the engineers assigned to them. That makes hiring not an administrative function but the most direct expression of what a firm is. Here is how we hire, stated openly, because it tells an engineer what working here is like and tells a client who will be on their system.
What we look for
- Judgment, not just fluency. Writing code that works is the baseline. What we look for is the judgment above it: knowing which problem is the real one, when to extend the framework rather than fight it, when the honest answer is "this should not be built." The categories of work we publish, architecture decisions, playbooks, deep dives, are all judgment made visible. We hire for the thing underneath them.
- The instinct to understand before changing. A great deal of our work is on systems we did not build. An engineer who reads first, who wants to understand why something is the way it is before altering it, is an engineer who will not turn a small fix into an incident. We look for that instinct directly.
- Honesty under pressure. The willingness to say "I do not know yet," "this is going to take longer," or "I think this is the wrong approach" is worth more than confident output. Engagements go wrong quietly when people are not comfortable saying uncomfortable things. We hire people who are.
- Care about the operating reality. We look for engineers who think past the demo, to the month-end, the exception case, the person who will use this every day. Caring about what happens after go-live is a trait, and we select for it.
What we do not optimise for
We do not hire for credentials as a proxy for capability, for the ability to perform under artificial interview pressure, or for fluency in whatever is currently fashionable. None of those reliably predicts the thing that matters: whether this person will make good decisions on a real client system with real consequences. We would rather assess that directly, even though it is harder to assess, than hire a clean signal that does not mean what it appears to mean.
What this says about how we work
Read the list back and the way we work is visible in it. A firm that hires for judgment is a firm that trusts engineers to make decisions rather than follow scripts. A firm that hires for "understand before changing" is a firm whose engagements move carefully on systems that matter. A firm that hires for honesty is a firm where bad news travels early, while it is still cheap. A firm that hires for care about operating reality is a firm whose definition of done is not the demo.
That is not a coincidence. The hiring bar and the engagement quality are the same thing observed at two moments. You cannot staff careful, honest, judgment-led engagements from people hired on different criteria.
The position, in one line
For an engineer: this is a place that hires for judgment and honesty and expects you to exercise both. For a client: the person on your system was selected for exactly the traits you would want in the person on your system. Those are the same sentence, which is the point.