Job Title: Head of Technology
Company: Sanctuary Computer (part of garden3d, a worker-owned creative collective)
Job Type: Contract to start. It begins with a 4-month fractional trial contract, paid hourly. If the person exceeds expectations, it becomes a permanent leadership role, and after 12-24 months they become eligible for the worker ownership programme.
Location: Remote, worldwide.
Salary/Pay: Trial contract at USD 110 - 175 per hour, depending on seniority and experience (the listing's header shows USD 140,000 - 250,000 per year). Benefits include profit sharing and an async, distributed team.
Experience: 12+ years building software, including at least 3 years leading engineers in a studio, agency, startup, or founder-led company
Skills Required:
- Deep experience engineering complex systems in production (distributed services, data pipelines, multi-platform products)
- A true generalist across frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and native
- Strong preference for practical engineering: convention over configuration, boring technology, platforms as a service
- Deep commitment to agentic development: loop engineering, evals and agents doing real work in a real codebase
- Fluency across React, Next.js, Ruby on Rails, Elixir and Phoenix, Sanity, Postgres and Redis
- Experience as the technical lead in winning work: scoping, estimating and pitching to clients
- A track record of hiring exceptional engineers and helping them improve
- Still hands-on, able to write code and not only review it
- Advantageous: hardware, firmware, or IoT sense, client services experience, Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect experience, open source work, and experience in a worker-owned or open-book company
Application Deadline: Not stated
Description:
garden3d is a worker-owned creative collective that includes the development studio Sanctuary Computer, the design studio XXIX, the community space network Index, and a media arm. Its clients include Google, Stripe, Figma, Mozilla, and The Nobel Prize, and its software team has built products such as The Light Phone and Mill. It is hiring a Head of Technology whose mandate is that everything the collective builds works, holds up in production, and is built the smartest way available. The person works closely with the founder and president, with about 70% of their time at Sanctuary Computer and 30% on garden3d's wider technology.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the technical blueprint on the most important projects and making the build, buy, or leave-out calls
- Making agentic development the default way Sanctuary Computer works
- Setting the engineering standard, including code review quality and architecture
- Hiring and developing exceptional engineers
- Making sure teams estimate reliably and deliver on the dates promised
- Acting as the technical voice in new business calls, scoping work and writing the technical side of proposals
- Planning projects that span software and hardware
- Deciding which tools and platforms the whole collective bets on
How to Apply:
Apply here. Submit a complete application with links that verify your work experience and identity. Incomplete applications won't move forward. The listing also asks you to mention the word "EXCELENT" (as spelled) when applying, to show you read the post. The interview process is an intro call, a panel interview, a reference call, then an offer.