How we work
Four things that are true here and are not true everywhere. Read them as filters, not as selling points.
Two hubs and remote
Singapore and Hangzhou are real offices; remote is a first-class location rather than an exception granted case by case. What we ask for is overlap, not a time zone — roughly four hours with the people you work with, whenever those fall for you.
Written before spoken
Decisions arrive as writing somebody can disagree with, before the meeting rather than after it. The comments in this codebase explain why rather than what, and that is the standard for a design doc, an incident note and a hiring decision too.
You ship it
The person who builds a thing owns it in production, including the week after and the incident at 3am. There is no separate team to hand a failure to, which is also why there is no separate team who has to guess what you meant.
Small on purpose
Every hire is visible in the product within a month. That is the upside. The downside is that there is nowhere to hide and no established process to lean on, and we would rather you knew that before the offer than after.
A concrete example of what "written before spoken" costs: most changes here carry a paragraph explaining the failure they prevent, and reviewers push back when that paragraph is missing. It is slower on the day. It is the reason someone can open a file eight months later and understand why a guard exists rather than deleting it because it looked redundant.
What comes with it
The same package everywhere, adjusted only where local law or local reality requires it.
- Equity
- Every full-time role carries options: four-year vest, one-year cliff. The strike price, the current preference stack and the last round's valuation are shown at offer rather than after you sign. If you do not know how to read those, we will walk you through them — an offer nobody understands is not an offer.
- Health
- Full medical, dental and vision for you and your dependants, in every location. Mental health sessions are covered under the same policy and are not counted separately or reported to anyone.
- Time off
- Twenty-five days plus local public holidays — and a minimum rather than only a maximum. If you have taken fewer than ten days by October, your manager is expected to raise it.
- Hardware
- The machine the work needs, replaced on a three-year cycle. A display, desk and chair budget for wherever you actually work, including at home if that is where you are.
- Learning
- USD 2,000 a year with no approval flow — books, courses, a subscription to a tool you want to understand. Conference travel is budgeted separately and does not come out of it.
- Parental leave
- Sixteen weeks fully paid for the primary carer, eight for the secondary, and a phased return at full pay for the first month back. Taking it is not a signal about your commitment and will not be read as one.
- Relocation
- Covered for Singapore and Hangzhou roles: visa and work-pass handling, the move itself, and the first two months of housing while you find somewhere.
- Trips
- The whole company meets in person twice a year, travel and accommodation covered. For a team split across two hubs and several time zones, this is not a perk — it is how the relationships that make asynchronous work possible get built.
The process
Four conversations, about two weeks end to end. We pay for the take-home.
Intro — 30 minutes
What you want to be doing, what the role actually is, and whether those two overlap. The compensation range is confirmed in this call rather than at the end, because discovering a mismatch in week three wastes considerably more of your time than ours.
Craft — 90 minutes
Your work, in depth, with the people you would work with. For engineers this is reading and changing real code from this repository, not inventing an algorithm on a whiteboard. For designers it is walking through a decision you made and defending the option you rejected.
Take-home or pairing — your choice
A scoped problem from our actual backlog, capped at four hours and paid at a consulting rate. If you would rather not work alone, or four hours of evening is not something your life has room for, take the paired session instead — it is a genuinely equal path, not the lesser one.
Team and offer
Conversations with two people outside your discipline, then a decision within three working days. You get a written reason either way, specific enough to be useful.
How should I prepare?
Read the documentation and open the studio as a guest. The strongest candidates arrive having formed an opinion about something in the product — including an opinion that we got it wrong.
Do I need to have used generative tools professionally?
For the research role, yes. For everything else, no. Judgement about complex interactive software transfers; familiarity with this month's model does not, and expires faster.
What if I need more than two weeks?
Say so and we will hold the process. Notice periods, family and existing commitments are normal. A deadline that exists only to create urgency is a tactic, and we do not use it.
Will you sponsor a visa?
For Singapore and Hangzhou roles, yes — including the work pass and the paperwork around it. For remote roles you need existing authorisation to work where you live.
What is the interview like if I am not a native English speaker?
Half the company works in Mandarin daily. Interview in either language for every role except Developer Advocate, where public English writing is the job.
Do you use AI screening on applications?
No. A person reads every application. Given what we build, it would be a strange thing to automate away the one part where judgement about a person is the whole point.
Nothing here fits?
Write anyway. Tell us what you would build and why this is the place to build it — the roles below are the ones we have written down, not the only shapes we would say yes to. Several of the most useful things this company needs are not currently a job title.
We read everything. If the answer is no, you will get a no rather than silence, and it will usually arrive within a week.
Open roles
These postings describe the team the product needs and the bands these markets pay. Confirm the details with us before making plans around them — we would rather say that than let a number on a page do the talking.