Every few months we get asked by customers, partners, and occasionally press how the team is growing. This is our answer, without inflation.
We hired one engineer this quarter. Her name is on the team page. She spent the first two weeks reading our code and asking very good questions. By week three she had shipped a meaningful improvement to our memory system. We are happy to have her.
We are still small. The company can still fit in a single medium-sized Zoom call. Everyone wears multiple hats. There is no marketing team, no HR team, no dedicated recruiter. The founders still write code most days. Meeting load is kept deliberately low because when everyone is writing code, meetings come out of your real work and not out of slack time you do not have.
We have two open roles as of this writing. A senior full-stack engineer with an interest in agent infrastructure. A research engineer for the Emebo project, which means someone willing to be the first dedicated person on a long-horizon research problem. Both are listed on the careers page with specific responsibilities, compensation bands, and the questions we will ask in the interview.
What we are looking for. The single consistent predictor we have seen of good engineers on a small team is: can this person own a project end to end, without needing someone to manage them through each step? That is a simple question in principle and a hard one in practice. It shows up in how candidates describe past projects. The strong ones describe what they owned, what they had to figure out themselves, and what they would have done differently with more time. The weaker ones describe what was handed to them and how they executed the plan.
Compensation. We pay competitively relative to our size and geography. We do not match the top of the market at large tech companies, and we are honest about that. What we offer instead: real ownership of real problems, the ability to ship things that ship all the way to production within days or weeks of writing them, equity that is meaningful because the company is early, and the kind of engineering culture that is only possible in a team small enough that everyone knows what everyone else is working on.
Remote or in-person. Both. We are based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Roughly half the team works from the office there. The rest are distributed across Europe and North America. For new hires we do not care where you live, as long as there is enough timezone overlap to have real working hours together. Practically that means: Eastern Standard Time and further east.
Interview process. It is short. An introductory call with one of the founders. A technical conversation with someone on the team in the relevant area. A paid work-sample project — we pay for the time because asking people to do unpaid work for a job is wrong. A final conversation about fit and offer. The whole thing typically takes two to three weeks, from first email to offer or no-offer. We try to decide quickly.
What we do not do. Whiteboard puzzles about data structures you would never use on the job. Multi-day onsites to demonstrate "culture fit," which is usually a proxy for bias. Trick questions. Reference checks we have not told you about. We try to treat candidates the way we would want to be treated, which mostly means being clear, being fast, and giving honest feedback whether or not we make an offer.
One thing we have learned from the hires so far. The best candidates do their homework. They arrive knowing what we do, having read our open source, having formed an opinion about where they would want to contribute. That is not about gaming the process. It is a signal of the same trait we are actually hiring for: the ability to own a problem and make it yours. The people who treat the interview as a standardized gauntlet — and answer every question with rehearsed talking points — are usually not a good fit, regardless of how strong their answers are.
One thing we want to be honest about. Hiring for a small team is stressful. Every hire changes the culture. A wrong hire costs a team our size much more than it costs a large company. We take it seriously, we are sometimes slow as a result, and that is a deliberate choice. If you apply and hear nothing for two weeks, it is almost never because we are ignoring you. It is because we are trying to be thoughtful about matching people to roles, and the smaller the team, the more that matters.
If you want to apply. The careers page has the two open roles. Links to our GitHub are in the footer so you can see the kind of code we write before you decide. The email on each job posting goes to one of the founders directly, not a filtered inbox. Put a sentence in the subject line that tells us something specific about what you want to work on here and why.
That is the hiring update. Not exciting, not dramatic, just the state of things. We will post again when there is more news.