Hard to get into.
Worth getting into.
We hire slowly and we hold the bar. This page is the whole process, including the parts most companies keep to themselves, because you should be able to decide whether it is worth your time before you spend any of it.
Five stages in.
Then the actual work starts.
Both halves, stated plainly.
A hard bar is only fair if what sits behind it is worth the effort. Here is each side of that trade.
What we ask of you
- Proof of shipped work, not credentials
- An artifact you can defend line by line
- Depth in one thing, competence across the stack
- Disagreement in the room, early, with evidence
- Willingness to be wrong in public
What you get from us
- Real client work from week one: banks, government, telco
- Named ownership of an engagement, not a ticket queue
- Products that ship to production, not pilots that die
- The current frontier tooling, because it is what we build with
- Room to publish and speak under your own name
Compensation is discussed openly at the offer stage, benchmarked against the Bahrain market for the level you land at.
Six steps, and why each one exists.
Most hiring processes are opaque by accident. Ours is written down so you can prepare for it, and so we have to run it the same way every time.
Application
20 minutesA structured application, not a CV drop. A portfolio is mandatory: nobody moves past this stage without one. Send one artifact you are proud of and a short written answer on what was hard about it.
A CV tells us where you were. An artifact tells us what you can do. Without one we have nothing to talk about.
Portfolio review
Async, 2-3 daysOne engineer reads your artifact and your writing against a published rubric. You get a real answer either way.
The cheapest honest signal we have, and it rewards people who build in public.
Technical defense
60 minutes, liveNo puzzles and no new coding challenge. We interrogate the work you already submitted, then ask you to make one live change to it.
The job is defending real decisions under questioning. So that is what we test. Anyone can pass a quiz about a binary tree.
The loop
One day, paidA deep dive on your strongest project, a paired build session on a real problem with synthetic data, and two conversations on how you work.
You should meet the people and the work before you commit. We pay for the day because your time has a price.
Decision
Within 14 days of applyingEvery interviewer writes their score before the debrief, so nobody anchors on the loudest voice in the room. No hire is the default; the evidence has to argue you up.
Unstructured debriefs measure who is most confident, not who is most capable.
Your first 30 days
OnboardingYou start on internal and synthetic work, meet the engagements, and learn how we build. Access to client systems opens up as you ramp, not on day one.
Our clients are banks, ministries and telcos. Nobody is dropped into that in week one, and that protects you as much as them.
Autonomy
From then onYou own decisions without waiting for permission. We are here to back you when a call is hard, not to approve the easy ones. You get the room to grow, and the responsibility that comes with it.
We hired you for your judgement. Spending the next two years second-guessing it would waste the reason we ran this whole process.
We assume you use AI. Tell us where.
We build AI for a living. It would be strange to pretend you do not use it, and stranger to ask you to work without it. Use whatever tools you use.
What we ask is that you say which tools you used, where you used them, and what you changed afterwards. Concealing it fails you. Using it well does not.
The technical defense is the part where this matters. If you can explain and defend every decision in your submission, it does not matter what helped you write it. If you cannot, it would not have mattered either way.
Five values, and what fails each one.
Every company publishes what it wants. The second column is the useful half, and it is what our interviewers actually score against.
Technical credibility
You have built it, not only specified it. Seniority here is measured in systems shipped, not years served.
Walks through their own architecture from memory, including the parts that went wrong.
Describes work only in adjectives, or only at the level of the slide deck.
Ownership to the outcome
You carry the work to the client, not to the handoff. Done means live and working for someone.
Follows a problem across a boundary that was not theirs to cross.
Treats the ticket closing as the finish line.
Direct and evidence-led
Opinions come with data. Disagreement comes early, in the room, not afterwards in private.
Changes their position when shown a number, and says so out loud.
Agrees in the meeting and relitigates it in the corridor.
Client trust is the asset
We never oversell what the technology can do. A client who trusts our no will believe our yes.
Tells a client something is not ready, and offers what is.
Promises a capability on the assumption it will exist by delivery.
Compounding craft
You leave the codebase and the people around you sharper than you found them.
Writes the thing down so the next person does not have to ask.
Builds something only they can maintain, and likes it that way.
What we are hiring for.
Every role below is a real seat with real work attached. If none of them fit and you are exceptional, write to us anyway.
Software Engineer
Build the products the company sells, not internal tooling around them.
What the job actually is
You will own a surface of a shipping product inside your first month, and it will be running against a real client before the quarter is out.
What we look for
- Has shipped something that ran in production under real load
- Reaches for the simplest thing that survives contact with users
- Can explain a decision they later regretted, and why
Attach your portfolio. Applications without one do not move past stage one.
How to apply
Email us with the role in the subject line. Send one artifact you are proud of - a repository, a paper, a system you designed, a product you shipped - and a short note on what was hard about it.
A CV is welcome but it is not what we read first. We reply to every application, and you will have a decision within 14 days of applying.
Send your applicationWe are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on evidence of what you have built.