CAREERS · CN SOLAR LABS
Thirty-three openings across thirty-one roles, and every one is published with its salary band, its equity range and how many people we are taking. Twelve of them are on RACD and the Consensus Data Terminal, which are the most important thing we do, and three are degree apprenticeships that require no degree at all. Open-minded about how a thing gets built, organised enough that nobody's week gets wasted, and genuinely relaxed about the hours in which you build it.
01
You will own a surface, not a ticket queue. The person who decides how a thing works is the person building it, and the review that matters happens with someone who read the code rather than the summary. There is no product manager translating between you and the problem, because there is no layer to translate through.
There are eight of us today and that number is going up. We are spread across time zones and we did not arrive here from the same place: different countries, different fields, different first careers, some with doctorates and some with no degree at all. That is deliberate rather than incidental. The problems we work on sit between disciplines, and a group of people who have all read the same books reliably finds the same answers. We want physicists and mathematicians and operators and designers sitting next to each other, we want people whose route here does not look like anyone else’s, and we particularly want the backgrounds that are not usually in this room at all. We care about building a genuinely diverse team because it is also the only way this work gets done well.
The cadence differs by company, on purpose. RACD moves at the speed of a research result and is measured that way. Platform ships weekly. Partner work ships daily, in front of an operator who will tell you immediately whether it helped. Matching the cadence to the problem is one of the principles the group holds itself to.
You will see the real numbers, including the ones that are not going well. Nobody here is managed by proxy: the founder reads the work, and disagreement in a review is the point of the review rather than a problem with it. In exchange we expect judgement, because there is no committee to defer to.
If you have ever been the person who fixed it at 03:00 and then rewrote the thing so it could never happen that way again: you already work the way we work.
ONE VENTURE, NOT NINE · SELF-CONTAINED
One of them, at a time. Not a pool, not a matrix, and not split three ways across a week: one company, one surface, and one set of people who are counting on you. A group of nine businesses is exactly the kind of place where someone ends up nominally helping with four of them and finishing none, so we do not staff that way. When you join, you join a venture.
The ventures are genuinely separate, and that is a deliberate piece of engineering rather than an accident of how we grew. Each one has its own codebase, its own roadmap, its own customers and its own on-call. There is no shared backlog into which anyone can drop work, no group-wide firefighting rota, and no mechanism by which another company’s bad week becomes your weekend. Where two ventures depend on each other they do it through an interface that is reviewed and versioned like any other contract, so a neighbour’s deadline is never quietly transmitted to you as urgency.
Moving between them is possible, and the decision is yours alone. When another venture has capacity you can put your hand up for it, and if the fit is there you move. What does not happen is the reverse. Nobody is reassigned to plug a gap, nobody is told on a Monday that they are on something else now, and no move happens because it suited a plan they were not part of. The flexibility runs one way, towards you, and you will never be forced through it.
SALARY
£150k to £1.5m+
£150,000 is the floor, not the target. Benchmarked, banded, and the same whether or not you negotiate.
TEAM
Eight, growing
Founding-shaped and deliberately mixed: many countries, many fields, several first careers.
LOCATION
Remote-first
Overlapping hours matter more to us than a postcode. Hybrid where the work is client-facing.
02
We are an innovative group and we mean it in the literal sense: the reason to do something a new way has to be better than because that is how it is done. We are also deliberately unchaotic about it. Six things hold both of those true at once, and each one carries the failure mode it is not permission for.
01
Yes, why not
The default answer to an idea nobody has tried is let us find out, not who approved this. We are extremely open-minded about where an answer comes from: a paper, an intern, a customer complaint, a language none of us has written before. Being wrong quickly is cheap. Being incurious is not.
Not: enthusiasm as a substitute for evidence.
02
Break things on purpose, not by accident
We are not precious about code, process, or a decision one of us made last quarter, including the founder's. Rewrite it, delete it, argue it down in a review. What we are precious about is a customer's data and an operator's Tuesday morning. Break the first freely; never the second.
Not: moving fast where the blast radius is somebody else.
03
Adopt the best practice, then beat it
We read what the field already knows before we invent anything, because most problems are solved and it is arrogant to pretend otherwise. Then we look for the place where the accepted answer is quietly wrong, and we build the better one. Nearly all of the interesting work here lives in that gap.
Not: novelty for its own sake, or cargo-culting a convention.
04
Stable underneath, fast on top
Foundations are deliberately boring. Data contracts, interfaces between ventures and the deploy path change slowly, are reviewed hard, and are expected to hold. Everything sitting on top of them can change daily, because the thing underneath will not move while you are standing on it.
Not: a platform rewrite every time something is mildly annoying.
05
Written down, so that speed is not chaos
One owner per surface. A short memo before anything expensive, saying what would make it a success and what would make us stop. Decisions logged where the next person will find them. Speed here comes from nobody being blocked, not from nobody knowing what is going on, and stopping something early counts as a win rather than a failure.
Not: three people rediscovering the same dead end in parallel.
06
Chill, and that is deliberate
Real work-life balance, not the kind that appears in a handbook and nowhere else. No hero hours, no weekend theatre, no proving commitment by being visibly online at 22:00. Rested people make better decisions on exactly the kind of problem we work on, and a pace you can hold for years is how a small group compounds.
Not: relaxed about whether the work is actually good.
Fast and chill are not in tension here. Almost everything that burns people out is rework, and almost all rework is a decision nobody wrote down.
03
For a long time this page carried four abstract shapes rather than vacancies, on the grounds that we would rather hire a person than fill a slot. That is still true, and the promise underneath the list is unchanged. What has changed is that we are now short of specific things in specific companies, and pretending otherwise would waste your time as well as ours.
So: 33 openings across 31 roles, in six of the nine companies plus two at group level, each one published with its base salary band, its equity range and the number of people we are taking. Twelve of the openings sit on RACD and the Consensus Data Terminal, because the research ventures are bounded by people rather than by capital and always have been. Three of them are degree apprenticeships that require no degree at all.
7 ROLES · 8 OPENINGS
R-01 · LEADS THE FUNCTION
The hardest problem in the group, and the person who decides what we work on and what we stop working on.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-02
The right answer may be a result rather than a sprint, and we would rather hire the person who can find the result.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-03
The distance between a model that works in a notebook and a model that holds at three in the morning is where this role lives.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-04
Correlation across an estate is a distributed systems problem wearing a statistics hat. Clocks disagree, sources vanish, and the answer still has to be one alarm.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-05
The bar is near-zero false positives. You cannot hit a bar you cannot measure, and measuring this one honestly is its own engineering problem.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-06
Ingest at source, no schema negotiation first. That sentence is easy to write on a website and is most of the engineering.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-07
We are about to hold other organisations' telemetry, which is a map of everything they are bad at. That deserves a named owner.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
4 ROLES · 4 OPENINGS
R-08
A corpus nobody else has is worth nothing until somebody can ask it a question, and the asking is a product problem before it is a modelling one.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-09
Entity resolution is the unglamorous half of this product, and the half that decides whether any of the rest of it is true.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-10
An analyst who waits eight seconds stops asking questions. Everything interesting about this product happens on the near side of that latency budget.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-11
One screen that has to hold a market, a counterparty and somebody's own launch at once, without turning into a dashboard.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
2 ROLES · 2 OPENINGS
R-12
The product is the sensor. Everything you build decides the quality of what the corpus records.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-13 · DEGREE APPRENTICESHIP, NO DEGREE REQUIRED
Four years, a degree at Queen Mary paid in full, and a real surface on a live consumer product from the first fortnight.
HYBRID · LONDON · ONE DAY A WEEK AT QMUL
8 ROLES · 8 OPENINGS
R-14
Work is a graph. Storing it as one is easy. Recomputing consequence across it the instant anything moves is not.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-15
Ten thousand nodes, sixty frames a second, and legible in ten seconds to an executive who has never opened it. All three.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-16
The graph is an API before it is a UI. Agents plan, re-sequence and flag drift on it natively, and nobody transcribes a status into a ticket.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-17
Continuum's argument is that boards report position and graphs report consequence. Almost nobody has heard it.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-18
The audience is engineers, who can tell inside a paragraph whether you have used the thing. So you will use the thing.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-19
A genuinely differentiated product almost nobody has heard of. That is a distribution problem, and distribution is measurable.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-20
Which segment, at what price, against whom, and the numbers that would change the answer.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-21 · DEGREE APPRENTICESHIP, NO DEGREE REQUIRED
Four years, a degree at Queen Mary paid in full, and a graph engine most graduates never get anywhere near.
HYBRID · LONDON · ONE DAY A WEEK AT QMUL
6 ROLES · 6 OPENINGS
R-22 · LEADS THE FUNCTION
Identical behaviour on bare metal, a hyperscaler, a colocation rack, and a provider that did not exist when the customer started. Somebody has to decide what that abstraction actually is.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-23
No platform team required, for the customer. The complexity does not vanish. It moves here.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-24
Push to deploy is a promise about the slowest part of somebody's day, and most of that time is the build.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-25
Zero-config edges on metal you chose. Every word of that is a networking problem.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-26
The pitch is bare-metal economics with a managed-platform experience. Somebody has to keep that arithmetic true, and pointed at the right customers.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-27 · DEGREE APPRENTICESHIP, NO DEGREE REQUIRED
Four years, a degree at Queen Mary paid in full, and access to real infrastructure rather sooner than is entirely comfortable.
HYBRID · LONDON · ONE DAY A WEEK AT QMUL
2 ROLES · 3 OPENINGS
R-28
Weeks inside the partner's business, writing code in their environment, graded on whether they grew.
HYBRID · EMBEDDED ON PARTNER SITES · TRAVEL FUNDED
R-29
Not a translator between engineers and a roadmap. The person who decides what the ladder is.
REMOTE · HYBRID WHERE THE WORK IS PARTNER-FACING
2 ROLES · 2 OPENINGS
R-30 · LEADS THE FUNCTION
We have published a salary floor, a sponsorship map and a culture page with the failure modes written next to each tenet. Somebody has to make all of that survive contact.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
R-31
Nine companies, a founder who reads the work, and a set of operating habits designed for eight people.
REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS WITH THE FOUNDER
Nothing is open on Black Fleet Executive, Black Fleet Operations or CN Solar Labs Capital right now. That is a statement about this quarter rather than about those companies, and if you are exceptional and none of the 31 roles above is quite your shape, write anyway. We have created roles for people before and will again.
EARLY CAREERS
If this would be your first job, there is a page for that, and the pay is the same.
Internships, graduate founding roles, research residencies and a multi-year apprenticeship with no degree required. All paid on the same £150,000 floor, all open all year. Early careers →
04
The salary is very competitive and we would rather say so plainly than make you find out three conversations in. Everything below is what we hold ourselves to for everyone, not a menu that gets negotiated per offer.
01
£150,000 to £1.5m and beyond
Base salary. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds is the floor, not the midpoint, and the top of the range is above one and a half million. Bands are published internally, and the offer is the same whether or not you push for more, because the band is the band.
Meaningful founding equity
Real ownership in the venture you are building, and upside in a group whose valuation base is growing.
Reviewed upward, without asking
Salaries are reviewed annually and indexed up. You should never have to negotiate for a number you have already earned. Profit participation on the ventures that generate cash.
Setup, referrals, relocation
Signing and setup bonus on day one, and a referral bonus paid in equity. Relocation is covered generously to any country we sponsor in, flights and shipping and temporary accommodation included. Visa sponsorship is unqualified across the United States, the United Kingdom, the EU and EEA and more than a dozen other jurisdictions, mapped in full below rather than left as something you have to prise out of us.
02
Remote-first, async by default
Overlapping hours matter to us; a postcode does not. Written memos instead of standups, and no core-hour theatre.
A holiday floor, not a holiday ceiling
A minimum number of days you are required to take. Unlimited leave usually means nobody takes any, so we set the floor instead of the limit.
Winter shutdown, and days without meetings
The whole group closes between Christmas and the New Year. Recurring no-meeting days so that deep work has somewhere to live.
03
Health, dental and vision, family included
Private cover for you and the people you live with, premiums paid.
Mental health, covered properly
Therapy covered without session-count games or a referral maze.
Parental leave and family building
Sixteen to twenty weeks for every parent, not only the one who gave birth, with a phased return. Support for fertility treatment, IVF, adoption and surrogacy.
Pension and protection
Employer-matched pension, life insurance and income protection.
Gym membership, on the group
A gym membership wherever you live, paid. Sitting with a hard problem for eight hours is a physical activity whether or not it looks like one.
04
Your setup, properly funded
A stipend that covers all of it: the machine you choose, monitors, broadband, a desk and a chair that will not ruin your back in five years. Refreshed on a cycle rather than granted once and forgotten.
A desk anywhere you want one
Membership at premium co-working and members' clubs, worldwide, so that home is the default rather than the only option. Work from Lisbon for a month if the mood takes you.
Food, on us
Most of us are nowhere near an office on any given day, so lunch comes to you instead: a weekly Deliveroo allowance, steered towards the healthy end. Nobody here should be working through a hard problem hungry.
Electric car and cycle schemes
Where the scheme exists in your country we run it, including salary-sacrifice electric vehicles and a cycle-to-work equivalent.
05
The whole group, together, monthly
Fully paid meetups at least once a month, somewhere in the world. Flights, hotels and the parts that are simply fun are covered. Remote-first only works when you actually know the people.
One trip a year, and it is not optional
Everyone is required to take at least one trip outside their own country each year, funded. Not necessarily a conference or a client visit; somewhere you have not been. Travel changes the shape of what a person thinks is possible, and we would rather pay for that than argue about it.
Conferences, talks, and the people at them
Go, present, and meet people who do not work here. Tickets, flights and the days themselves are compensated, including for work you want to give rather than only work you want to watch.
Lounges, status, and a few doors that open
Group partnerships cover unlimited airport lounge access, status with several airlines and hotel groups, and access to museum and exhibition programmes in a number of cities. The upside of a small group that travels a great deal.
06
Protected research time, and you publish
A protected day a week on the research ventures. Papers, preprints and talks are encouraged rather than tolerated, with your name on them.
Compute, and any book
Budget for GPU and cluster time for your own experiments, and books and journal access with nobody to ask first.
Incubate your own venture
Pitch a company. If the case holds up, we fund it and you run it. This is the stated path into founding something here, not a theoretical one.
No non-competes. Your IP is yours
We do not use non-competes. What you build on your own time stays yours, and open-source contribution happens on company time.
VISA SPONSORSHIP
Almost every company treats this as something you have to extract from a recruiter three conversations in. Here is the map instead.
01
We can sponsor. No caveat
If you have an offer and you need sponsorship in one of these, we will run it. You do not need to check with us first, and it will not be the thing that costs you the role.
02
Confirm with us first
There is a route in each of these, but it depends on the role and the timing. Raise it in the first conversation rather than the last and you will have a straight answer quickly.
03
Anywhere else: hard, and worth asking anyway
Everywhere not named above is genuinely difficult and we would rather say so than string you along. It is not a no in principle. If you are the right person we will look at what is actually possible, and if it is not possible you will hear that early and plainly rather than after four conversations.
Relocation is covered generously to anywhere on this map we sponsor in: flights for you and your family, shipping, temporary accommodation while you find somewhere of your own, and every legal and filing cost along the way. Moving country is disruptive enough without it also being expensive.
LONDON · EAST VILLAGE · AND A FLOOR IN TOKYO
Suite 608 at 26 Cheering Lane, in East Village on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, is where the entity sits. It is the registered office and the address on every contract, invoice, and formal notice, and it is where post reaches us.
Command and control is the floor we lease on the fiftieth level of Azabudai Hills Mori JP Tower in Tokyo, and that is deliberate: a significant part of this business is concentrated across Asia and the United States west coast, and Tokyo is the one place that sits inside both of those working days. It is still a lease rather than a destination. It collects no post, it keeps no reception desk, and nothing formal should be addressed to it. Treat it as somewhere we can be, not somewhere to be sent.
Nobody is expected at either. They are somewhere to run a launch from, to sit with a partner in person, or to work from for a month because you feel like being in London or Tokyo, and the travel to get there is covered like any other.
05
01
A conversation, not a screen
Forty-five minutes with someone who will actually work with you. We talk about what you have built and what broke. No riddles, no reversing a linked list.
02
One real problem
Drawn from something we are genuinely working on, scoped to a few hours, paid if it takes longer. You keep the work either way.
03
Working session
We sit down together on your solution and push on it. This is the closest simulation of the job we can build, and it is the part that decides.
04
Offer, fast
A decision within a week of the working session. If it is a no, you get the actual reason.
06
Which venture would I actually be working on?
One of them, and only one at a time. Each venture is self-contained, with its own codebase, roadmap, customers and on-call, so nobody here is spread thinly across four things at once. Moving to another is possible when that venture has capacity, and only you can start the move. You will not be reassigned to fill a gap.
Is £150,000 really the minimum?
It is the floor rather than the midpoint, and it applies to everyone in the group. Bands are published internally, and the offer is the same whether or not you push for more, because the band is the band.
Do I need a degree, or a particular one?
No to both. We hire physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, operators, designers and people whose route here looks like nobody else's, including people with no degree at all. What we read first is the thing you built and what you learned when it broke.
Where do I have to be?
Wherever you like, within overlapping hours. We are remote-first and a postcode matters far less to us than whether we can reach each other during the working day. Some partner-facing work is hybrid, because it genuinely needs to happen in a room with an operator.
How big is the team?
Eight today, with thirty-three openings posted, so the honest answer is that it is about to be roughly five times that. Small enough that everyone still knows what everyone else is doing, which is part of why the ventures are kept separate rather than run as one pool, and part of why we are hiring into named surfaces rather than into a shared backlog.
Why are there suddenly thirty-one roles?
Because each one is a surface that currently has nobody on it, and we would rather say that plainly than dress eight people up as a full team. RACD in particular has been bounded by people rather than by anything else since it started, and Continuum has been carrying a graph engine, a renderer and an agent surface on far too few pairs of hands. The pace is deliberate, and the guard on it is that we are hiring one owner per surface rather than building a pool of generalists to allocate later.
What is the QMUL degree apprenticeship, exactly?
Three places on a Level 6 Digital and Technology Solutions degree apprenticeship, Software Engineer pathway, run with Queen Mary University of London. Four days a week you are an engineer on one venture, one day a week you are at QMUL, and it runs four years. We pay the fees, the university day is protected rather than notionally protected, and coursework happens in work hours. One place each on Consensus, Continuum and Scaley, so you belong to one team rather than rotating. The pay is £150,000, the same floor as everybody else in the group, for all four years. It is the one route here that carries no equity, and we would rather put that in the advert than in the offer letter. You need the right to work in the UK and Level 3 qualifications; you do not need a degree, and you are not expected to have written code professionally before.
Do the role pages list a tech stack, and is it a filter?
Every role page says what you would be working in, and none of it is a requirement. We do not screen on tools. A stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work, and the person most likely to be right about replacing half of ours is usually the one who went deep somewhere else. Read it as a description of the terrain rather than a gate.
Are the salary bands and equity ranges on the role pages real?
Yes, and they are the same numbers we work from internally. The offer lands inside the published band whether or not you negotiate, the equity is in the venture you would actually work on rather than a group-level fraction, and the two group roles carry equity in the parent because they serve all nine companies. The three degree apprenticeships are the exception and carry no equity at all, which is stated on each of those pages rather than buried. If an offer ever falls outside a published band, the band was wrong and we will say so.
What does the interview process involve?
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. No riddles and no reversing a linked list. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.
How much travel is involved?
Fully funded group meetups at least once a month, somewhere in the world, and exactly one obligation: a trip outside your own country each year, on us. Flights, hotels and the parts that are simply fun are covered in both cases.
Can I keep working on my own projects?
Yes. We do not use non-competes, what you build on your own time stays yours, and open-source contribution happens on company time.
Can I publish?
Yes, and on the research ventures it is expected rather than merely tolerated. A protected day a week, your name on the paper, and travel covered for the conferences you present at as well as the ones you attend.
None of the open roles is quite my shape. Should I still write?
Yes. The thirty-three openings are what we are short of, not a fence around who we will talk to, and there is no closing date on any of them. We have created roles for people before and will again. Use the form in section 07 rather than a role page, tell us what you built, and say why this group rather than another one.
I meet most of a role and not all of it. Is that a no?
No, and say which part you do not meet in the first paragraph. Nothing on any role page is a filter applied before a human reads you, no role requires a degree, and the working session decides far more than the list does. What we cannot do much with is an application that quietly hopes we will not notice.
Do you sponsor visas?
Yes, and we publish exactly where rather than making you ask. We sponsor without qualification across the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and EEA, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman. China, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and South Africa need confirming with us first, and there is a route in each. Anywhere else is genuinely hard, though still worth asking. There is a map of all of it in section 04.
If this would be your first job, the early careers page answers a different set of questions, including what happens at the end of an internship and whether we fund a degree you left unfinished.
07
Every role above has its own page with its own form, and applying there tells us immediately which one you mean. This one is for everything else: if two of them fit, if none of them does, or if you think there is a role here we have not thought to write down. There is no closing date on any of it. What we read first is the thing you built and what you learned when it broke.