No open roles at the moment

There is nothing to apply for — here is the honest version

Cubic Pixel is one person. There are no vacancies, no hiring pipeline and no recruitment budget, and a product built on not overstating things is not going to run a decorative jobs board. What follows is what this work is actually like, and what would make a speculative message worth reading.

Where things genuinely stand

Tessira is free to use and has no billing in it, so there is no revenue to hire against. The studio has no employees, no office and no outside investment. Nobody is being interviewed, no roles are being drafted, and there is no shortlist somebody is already on.

If that changes, this page changes with it — the vacancy will be described here in specific terms, with what it pays, before anyone is asked to spend an afternoon writing an application. Until then, treat this page as a description of the work rather than an invitation to apply.

How the work is done

Six habits this product is built on

Not values chosen for a careers page — these are the working rules that already govern every change that ships, and anyone joining would inherit them.

Look at it, do not assume

A change is not finished when the code reads correctly. It is finished when the page has been rendered in a real browser, measured and looked at. Nearly every serious bug here was caught that way, and nearly every one that escaped was reasoned about instead.

Say the true thing

Marketing copy is held to the same standard as code. If the app cannot do it, the page does not claim it — which is why you will find “encrypted at rest” here and never “end-to-end encrypted”, and why an external AI provider is named rather than implied.

Privacy as engineering

Guarantees that live in a policy document are decorations. The ones that matter fail closed in code: the checks that look for identifying data in an outbound request throw rather than transmit, and account isolation is proved with adversarial tests rather than asserted.

Detail is the job

Whether a check mark is optically centred, whether a section heading repeats correctly across a page break, whether an animation loops when it should stop after three passes. Users cannot articulate these things, but they can feel all of them.

Write it down as you go

Decisions, constraints and the reasons behind them are recorded next to the code, in the same change that makes them true. A one-person project only survives because the notes from six months ago are still accurate.

Delete more than you add

Every feature is a maintenance obligation for one person, indefinitely. The default answer to a good idea is no, and the ones that get through have to displace something or justify their existence for years.

The unglamorous truth

What working on this would actually involve

Written to put people off as much as to attract them. If none of this sounds appealing, that is useful information for both of us.

A deliberately small stack

One edge worker, a key-value store, static assets and a headless-browser rendering binding. The interface is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework, no bundler and no build step — which is liberating if you actually know the platform, and uncomfortable if your instinct is to reach for a library.

You would need to be fine with reading a specification rather than a package's documentation, and with the fact that “add a dependency” is usually the wrong answer.

Print, which is not the web

A significant part of this product is typesetting for A4 paper through a browser engine. Page breaks, repeating headings, margins that a browser will not paint, fonts that must be embedded because the render environment cannot reach the network. The rules are unintuitive and mostly undocumented.

The way you learn them is by rendering, rasterising and looking at the output — repeatedly, and often to discover that the obvious approach is empirically impossible.

Costs you can feel

The product is free, so every rendered PDF and every AI request is a real cost carried by one person. That is why results are cached against their content, why an idle browser session is never left running, and why nothing analyses your CV unless you clicked something.

Engineering decisions here have prices attached, and you would be expected to think about them rather than treat capacity as infinite.

People's careers, in your hands

The content in this app is somebody's employment history, and losing it or leaking it is not a bug you recover from with an apology. Data handling gets treated with more caution than the feature it serves, and “it probably works” is not an acceptable standard for anything touching storage, encryption or the AI boundary.

No specialisation to hide in

The same person designs the page, writes the code, writes the copy on it, deploys it and answers the support email when it breaks. There is nobody to hand a half-finished thing to, and there is no design team to reconcile with. The upside is that nothing is lost in translation; the downside is that you own it entirely.

If a role ever opened

The kinds of help that would actually matter

These are not vacancies and nothing here is being recruited for. They are an honest description of where a second pair of hands would make the most difference, so a speculative message can be aimed at something real.

  • Someone who knows edge runtimes properly. Not “has used a serverless framework”, but understands the constraints — request lifetimes, why work has to outlive a disconnected client, what a key-value store is and is not good at.
  • A designer who can typeset. Someone whose interest in a CV template is the measure of a line, the vertical rhythm and how it behaves on page three — not just how the first screen looks in a mockup.
  • A recruiter or hiring manager who will be blunt. Someone who reads CVs for a living and is willing to say which of Tessira's advice is genuinely useful and which is folklore repeated across the internet.
  • Someone who writes clearly about difficult things. Privacy, encryption and AI boundaries have to be explained truthfully without either frightening people or flattering them. It is harder than it looks and it matters more than it looks.

Sending something speculative

Perfectly welcome, as long as you know what it is: a note to one person who currently has nothing to offer you. It will be read, and you will get a reply, and that reply will probably say there is still no role.

If you want it to be worth your time, four things make the difference:

  1. Something you have made that you are actually proud of, and one paragraph on what was hard about it.
  2. An opinion about Tessira — a decision you think is wrong, a template that does not work, a claim on this site you would challenge. Specific beats flattering.
  3. What you would want to be doing, honestly, rather than a description shaped to fit whatever you think is being looked for.
  4. What you would need to make it worth leaving whatever you are doing now. Better to establish that in message one than message six.
hello@cubicpixel.co
Commitments

What will not happen here

A product about honest hiring documents has no business being careless with the people who write them.

No unpaid work

No “small paid-in-exposure project”, no speculative template designs, no take-home exercise that quietly produces something shippable. If work is done for this product, it is paid for.

No ghosting

Every message that is clearly written by a person to this studio gets a reply, including the ones where the answer is no. Silence as a rejection is cowardice with a diary excuse.

No phantom vacancies

No listings kept open to collect candidates, no role advertised before it is funded, and no salary range invented to look competitive. When there is nothing, this page says nothing — as it does today.

Questions

Asked often enough to answer here

Will you keep my details on file for future roles?

There is no candidate database, no applicant tracking system and no talent pool — an email that arrives is just an email in an inbox. That is the honest answer, and it means the practical thing is to write again if a role is ever posted here.

If you would rather your message was not retained at all, say so in it and it will be deleted once it has been answered.

Do you take interns or students?

Not currently. Supervising someone well is a substantial time commitment, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it — an unsupervised intern on a product handling people's personal data is a bad idea for everyone involved.

Do you use freelancers or contractors?

Not at present. If a specific piece of specialist work ever needs commissioning — an accessibility audit, a security review, a template designed by someone better at typesetting than I am — it would be a paid, scoped engagement, and it would be mentioned here.

Are you looking for investment or a co-founder?

No. Tessira exists partly because nobody is being paid to move a metric, and taking money to grow would change what gets built almost immediately. That is not a moral position about funding in general, just a description of what this particular product is for.

Can I write about Tessira, or feature it somewhere?

Yes, and hello@cubicpixel.co is the address for it. Questions will be answered accurately, including the unflattering ones — what the product does not do is on the about page in as much detail as what it does.

I am here because I am job hunting, not job offering.

Then you are in the right place for the wrong page. The CV writing guide and interview tips are written for you, and the app itself is free — no card, no trial, no watermark on what you download.

Nothing to apply for. Something to use.

The most useful thing this page can do today is send you back to the product it describes. Start a CV, and tell us where it falls short.