Ingenuity by divergence.

That arrangement has consequences you can measure. With almost nobody on the payroll who is not delivering, our overhead is low and our prices follow it. With no handoffs between whoever sold the work, whoever delivers it and whoever supports it, we move at the pace of the people actually doing the work, which is to say quickly. And because your relationship is with the people building your system rather than with an account manager standing in front of them, it tends to be a real one; the accounts we have kept longest are the ones where that was true.

Where a larger firm would put a bench of junior staff, we put ourselves; the work is done by the best and brightest, without compromise.

It is, we will admit, a rather good time to be small.

declinamus item motus nec tempore certo nec regione loci certa, sed ubi ipsa tulit mens.

We too swerve in our motions, at no fixed time and no fixed place, but where the mind itself has carried us.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura II.259–260

Clinamen is Lucretius's word for the swerve: the small, unpredictable deviation that lets atoms collide into something new instead of falling forever in a straight, deterministic line. He needed it for a reason that had little to do with physics. Without the swerve there is no free will, only a chain of causes running back to the beginning of things; with it, a mind can move itself, at no fixed time and no fixed place, but where it wills.

That is more or less our entire theory of the business. Value comes from the people who don't fall neatly into a lane, who deviate productively, who see the whole board rather than one square of it, and who value autonomy over direction. Such people are, we will happily admit, a little weird; they are not what most people picture when they hear the word engineer, because they are not only engineers. The clients who find us tend to appreciate the same thing. What binds the lot of us together is the habit of exercising a bit of free will where the normal order of operations does not fit, and that habit is what makes all the difference.

We are looking for senior generalists: autodidacts with real professional mileage who are genuinely un-bothered by not knowing something yet, because they know they'll learn it. You are not defined by a stack. You've picked up whatever the work required, more than once, and you enjoyed it. You can go into the weeds to design and build a solution, and then come up for air to sit across the table from a client and explain it in plain English.

In the spirit of not wasting anyone's time: this is a poor fit for someone who wants a single narrow specialty and a tidy ticket queue, who prefers a large org to be one cog within, or who disengages the moment the work drifts outside their comfort zone. If that is not you, and the rest of this page reads like somewhere you would rather be, write to us.

Read the full posting for the current role.