Careers
How we work, and who we hire.
We have no open roles posted right now. We still read everything that arrives, and the studio has hired from unsolicited applications before it has hired from a job board.
Current openings
None listed. We could put up a page of aspirational roles we are not currently hiring for, and plenty of studios do, but wasting your time is a poor introduction.
What is true: we hire irregularly, usually when a project makes it obvious we need a specific kind of person, and we look at the applications we already have first. Sending something now is not wasted effort even though there is nothing to apply to.
How we work
What the job is actually like.
Written for the version of you deciding whether to bother, not for the version who has already accepted an offer.
You own something end to end
Not a ticket queue. A surface — a feature, a subsystem, a product area — including its design decisions, its failure states, and what happens after it ships. Ownership without the authority to make decisions is just blame.
Small teams, senior people
The person who scopes the work builds it. We do not have a layer that translates between the two, because that layer is where most of the information gets lost.
Releases on a rhythm
We hold the cadence and move the scope, which means the hard prioritisation conversation happens early and in the open rather than in the last week before a date nobody believes in.
Writing over meetings
Decisions get written down with their reasoning. It is slower in the moment and dramatically faster six months later, when the only question that matters is why something was done this way.
No crunch as a strategy
Occasionally something goes wrong and a week gets ugly. That is different from a schedule that only works if everyone gives up their evenings, which is a planning failure being paid for by the wrong people.
Our products are real work
Rune and Dermiva are not side projects. Time on them is time on the studio's actual portfolio, with real users and real reviews attached.
Who we hire
Four things we look for.
None of them are years of experience with a particular framework. All of them are visible in work you have already done.
Generalists who finish
The last ten percent of a feature is the part that decides whether users trust it, and it is the part most people find boring. We are looking for the ones who find it interesting — or at least non-negotiable.
People who argue about scope
The most valuable thing an engineer or designer here does is push back on what is being built before anyone builds it. If your instinct on receiving a spec is to ask what problem it solves, you will fit.
Taste, demonstrated
We care much more about a small thing you made well than a large thing you contributed to. Empty states, error copy, and the first-run experience of your own side project tell us more than a CV does.
Comfortable with the whole stack
Not expert in all of it — comfortable moving through it. Product work does not respect the boundary between client, server, and design, and neither can the people doing it.
Applying
What to send us.
One email. In it, a link to something you made and a short description of one decision you made while building it that you would defend — including what it cost.
That is genuinely the whole thing. A CV is welcome and is not what we read first. Cover letters explaining your passion for our mission are read with sympathy and change nothing.
We reply to everyone, including no. It sometimes takes a couple of weeks.
Not looking for a job?
We are also open for project work.
Our B2B and SaaS practices are taking partners. If you have something you need built rather than someone you want to be, the same address works.
Contact the dock
One address, read by the people who would do the work. No intake form, no calendar link — just an email.
tphamdn@gmail.com