Long tenures. Real ownership. No agency dynamics.
We hire rarely and we hire senior. The roles below are the open seats, not aspirational headcount, not perpetual job postings. If one fits, the same engineers reading this page will read your application.
What working here is, and isn't.
Shubpy is a small senior team. There is no "ladder of leverage" where engineers manage people who manage people. The principal engineer on every project is the engineer on every project. Career growth here means depth and ownership, not headcount underneath you.
We pay senior engineering salaries, with a paid 4-hour take-home as part of the loop and a paid two-week trial for finalists if the role is a stretch. Sabbaticals are real: six paid weeks every four years. We don't have unlimited PTO; we have measured PTO that everyone actually takes.
The best engineers we've ever worked with stayed because the work was good and the system around the work didn't punish them. That's most of what we try to build internally.
If "we work with senior engineers, we pay them like senior engineers, and we let them stay senior engineers" sounds like a relief, the open roles below might be worth a closer look.
Open roles, currently hiring.
Four sessions. Paid take-home. Honest debrief.
We optimize for signal, not endurance. The process is short, the debriefs are written, and we tell you the actual reason if it's a no.
Intro chat
30 minutes with the founder or hiring lead. We learn about you; you learn about the work. No coding.
Take-home
A 3–4 hour realistic problem you can do in your own time. Paid. We respect the cap; you should too.
Working session
90 minutes with two engineers, walking through your take-home and a related architecture problem. Pairing, not interrogation.
Founder loop
60 minutes with the founder. Trade-offs, working preferences, the things that determine fit at a small team. You ask the hard questions too.
Whether this is a fit, plainly.
You'll probably like working here.
- You want depth: long-running engagements, real ownership, the same codebase for years.
- You like small teams where decisions are made in conversations, not steering committees.
- You believe "engineering quality" is a property of the system, not a culture statement.
- You want to do principal-engineer work without managing a team to do it.
- You want a sabbatical you'll actually take, and a PTO policy that isn't theater.
- You're senior enough to be comfortable on-call for systems you helped design.
You'll probably bounce off.
- You measure career progress in headcount under you. We don't have a management track.
- You want a stable 9-to-5 with no on-call. Engagements have real production stakes.
- You want a large engineering org with extensive process. We're 11 people; we have working agreements, not policy.
- You haven't shipped to production. We hire senior; we don't have the bandwidth to ramp early-career engineers properly.
- You want to specialize narrowly. Engagements span layers; we ask everyone to be broad.
- You'd prefer to disappear into a sub-team. The work is small enough that everyone's name is on something.
Think we should know about you?
We read every application. Replies come from engineers, not a recruiting system. If a role doesn't fit but the work does, send a general application; we maintain a list.