FlowstateLLP

Engineers who
own the whole thing.

Small team, unusually wide surface area, senior ownership from the first month. This page describes how we work and how we hire, including the parts that will not suit everyone.

Open roles

No named opening
at this moment.

We would rather say that than list a role we are not actually hiring for. We do read every speculative application, and we have hired ahead of need more than once when the right person got in touch.

What to send

  • Something you built, and what you would change about it now
  • A repository, a shipped product, or a written explanation — any of the three
  • Which of the practices on this site you would want to work on
  • No cover letter necessary; three honest paragraphs beat a page of adjectives
How we work

Including the parts
that will not suit everyone.

  • 01

    You own things, not tickets

    Engineers here own a service or a subsystem end to end — the modelling, the API, the tests, the deployment and the pager. Not a queue of tickets someone else scoped and someone else will operate.

  • 02

    You talk to the client

    There is no account manager relaying questions. The person building the thing sits in the conversation about what it should do, which is the only way requirements survive contact with reality.

  • 03

    Breadth is the job

    Across a year you might work on an ERP schema, an agentic workflow and a mobile app for people wearing gloves. If you want to specialise narrowly for five years, this is the wrong place — and that is a real trade-off, not a pitch.

  • 04

    We write things down

    Architecture decisions, runbooks, why we rejected the other option. Partly for the client, mostly because a team that does not write things down re-litigates the same decision every six months.

  • 05

    Bad news travels fast

    If something is late or wrong, you say so that week. Nobody here is rewarded for optimistic status updates, and nobody is punished for an early warning.

  • 06

    Reviewed work, reviewing work

    Every change goes through review, including the most senior person's. Not as a gate but because it is the cheapest way to spread what people know.

Process

Four steps,
about two weeks.

No whiteboard algorithms, no unpaid take-home, and a real reason if the answer is no.

  1. 01

    A conversation, not a screen

    Thirty to forty minutes with an engineer, not a recruiter. We talk about something you have actually built and what you would change about it. Ask us anything, including what is annoying about working here.

  2. 02

    A paid exercise

    A realistic problem, scoped to about four hours, close to the work we actually do. We pay for your time at a fair rate whether or not we proceed. Unpaid take-homes are a transfer of value from the candidate to the company and we do not do them.

  3. 03

    A working session

    Ninety minutes going through your exercise together and extending it — the closest honest approximation of pairing with us. No whiteboard algorithms, no puzzles, no trivia about a language spec.

  4. 04

    A decision, with reasons

    An answer within three working days, and if it is no you get the actual reason. References at the end, and we will give you ours to call too.

Questions

Before you apply.

Are you hiring right now?

There is no named opening at this moment, but we read every speculative application and we hire ahead of need when someone good gets in touch. If the way we work sounds right, send us something.

Is the work remote?

We are based in Hyderabad and work hybrid there. Fully remote works for senior people who have done it before, with meaningful overlap with the team's day. We are honest that junior engineers learn considerably faster in a room with other engineers.

Do you do whiteboard interviews?

No. No algorithm puzzles, no reversing a linked list on glass, no trivia. We look at real work: something you built, and a paid exercise close to what we actually do.

Do you really pay for the take-home exercise?

Yes, at a fair hourly rate, whether or not we move forward. Asking candidates to work several unpaid hours filters for people who can afford to, which is not the same thing as filtering for people who are good.

What if I do not match the listed experience range?

Apply anyway and say why. The range is a signal about the level of ownership involved rather than a filter, and we have hired outside it more than once.

Do you take interns or people changing career?

Occasionally, and only when we have the capacity to mentor properly. An intern nobody has time for is a bad experience for everyone, so we would rather say no than take someone on and neglect them.

Get in touch

Think you would fit?

Send us something you built and what you would change about it. That tells us more than a CV, and it is the only thing we actually read first.