Careers at Sikur — the company behind Vigil
No open roles. Here is what would change that.
Sikur is one engineer. A second person is a revenue problem, not a funding one.
This page exists so nobody spends an evening writing to a company that cannot hire. It says how many people work here, what would have to be true before that changes, and what is worth doing in the meantime.
One engineer. No pipeline, no pool.
Sikur is run by Maria. She writes the code, answers the email and cuts the releases. Headcount is one. There is no contractor on part-time, no bench, and no role being quietly scoped for later.
The usual careers page hedges here — "always looking for great people", a form, an autoresponder. That form collects hope. If you write to Sikur, it arrives in one inbox belonging to the person who would do the hiring, or it does not arrive at all. Thinner than most companies imply, and stated so you can judge it.
How the company is set upThree things, in this order.
None of them is a funding round.
Licence sales, not a raise
Hiring is a multi-year commitment to someone else's rent. The bar is licence income that could carry a salary for years without a single new sale — not a runway number that assumes the next round. Vigil is a one-time licence, so that money accumulates slowly and predictably. The bar has not been met, which is why this page reads the way it does.
One codebase, one maintainer
Half a job is worse than none. There is no support queue to hand over, no design system to own and no platform team to join — the work is one codebase with one maintainer. A role can only exist once some part of it is genuinely separable: a second product, or a support and documentation surface large enough to be somebody's whole week.
No recruiters, no talent pool
If a role opens it appears here, with the money in it, and the process would be paid work on a real task rather than a whiteboard. No agency is retained, no CV database exists and nothing is being collected in advance. A pool of applicants for a job that does not exist is a list of people waiting.
Enough detail to rule yourself out.
Most of what follows is a constraint, not a perk. A one-person company is quiet, slow to answer, and has nobody to escalate to. Anyone hired would work remotely, because there is nowhere else to work. Some engineers find that the best conditions they have had; others find it isolating inside a month. Both reactions are correct, and it is cheaper to discover which one you are now.
The products carry the same constraints. Anything Sikur ships has to run on a stranger's server, against their database, without calling home. That rules out a category of shortcuts and rules in a lot of unglamorous work on failure paths.
Three things worth an evening.
None of these substitutes for a job, and none creates an obligation in either direction. They are simply what would be useful if you were going to spend time on Sikur anyway.
The most useful is the least flattering: a bug report with a reproduction. It costs you twenty minutes and it is worth more here than a cover letter.
The questions this page gets.
If you want to. One message with what you do well and a link to something you built — no CV formatting, no cover letter. It goes to s8kur3@gmail.com and is read by the person who would do the hiring. What it does not do is enter a system: there is no applicant tracker, no tagging, no "we'll keep you on file" automation. If a role opens and something in that inbox fits, it gets reread. That is the entire mechanism.
No, and treating it as one would spoil it for both sides. Contribute because a limitation annoys you and you want it gone, or don't. The narrower true thing: a merged pull request means your code has been read closely, which is more than most interviews establish. It is not a promise, and there is no role today for it to lead to.
CONTRIBUTING.md answers this before you write a line, because it is the uncomfortable part. Vigil Core is AGPL-3.0, and the same codebase is also sold under a commercial licence — so opening a pull request means agreeing your contribution may be released under both. Plenty of people are not comfortable with that. The file says so, and adds that a bug report with a clear reproduction is valuable on its own and costs you nothing.
None of them. Unpaid work on a product that is sold is not an apprenticeship, and there is no equity worth issuing in a self-funded company of one. If Sikur ever hires someone, it will pay money.