Who we look for.
We do not staff FDEs who have not shipped into real stakes. We do not staff engineers who need someone else to define done, or who cannot work inside a client's constraints without complaining about them. The roster is small and hand-picked. The bar is specific on purpose.
The four things we screen for
Shipped into real stakes
You have personally shipped production AI systems where a mistake mattered: money moved, a decision was made, a regulator could ask. Not advised on. Not prototyped. Shipped, and lived with what happened next. Names and evidence you can point to.
Senior judgment
You know what to build and, harder, what to leave out under a deadline. You can verify an output you cannot fully read, and you make a system abstain instead of guess. The tools change every quarter; the judgment is what we are buying.
At home in constraints
You can build inside someone else's cloud, data boundaries, and compliance without tripping their controls or treating security as someone else's problem. Banks, hospitals, and governments are the normal case here, not the exception.
Builds for the handover
You write code and runbooks the client's team can own after you leave. The measure of the job is not what you shipped, it is whether they can run it without you. If handover bores you, this is the wrong role.
What we turn away
Not as a judgment of the person. As a judgment of fit for this specific work.
The build-and-leave consultant
Ships something only they can run, then bills forever to keep it alive. That is the dependency model we exist to replace. If the handover feels like giving away your moat, we are not aligned.
The demo-shipper
Brilliant in a sandbox, untested in production. A demo that wows in a meeting and falls over under real load and real data is not shipping. We grade what survives contact with users.
The constraint-allergic
Wants greenfield, full access, and no compliance friction. Real environments are messy and locked down. An engineer who can only work in ideal conditions cannot work where the stakes are.
If you are unsure whether you qualify. The honest test: have you shipped systems that real people and real money depended on, inside an environment you did not fully control, and left someone else able to run them? If yes, apply. We would rather read your application than have you talk yourself out of it.