What we do

Counder is the network for collective understanding — a global community of remarkable people from different worlds, making sense of a changing world together. The conference is the once-a-year peak: 500+ curated leaders from 27+ nationalities gathering in Cape Town. But the network runs year-round, with curated introductions and a digital platform that keeps members collaborating between editions. Our members are investors, founders, and decision-makers operating across finance, technology, and emerging markets — the kind of people who turn understanding into co-investment, partnership, and action.

Why work for us

You'd be joining a small, sharp team building an AI-native business — not a tech company, but a business where AI is genuinely how the work gets done. Engineering is a tight function with wide ownership: no ticket factories, no sprint theatre, no layers of approval. Real product, real users, real revenue, and the latitude to shape what comes next. You also get access to the Counder network and events that most people only read about.

Our culture

We run on trust and judgement, not process. The team is in-person in Cape Town, deliberately small, and values clear thinking over theatre. We hire for AI-native instincts, bias for simplicity, and the kind of generalist who's curious about how the business actually works — not just the code that supports it. Building things that don't need to be built is a real failure mode; we try to avoid it.

Our engineering process

We build AI-native. Claude Code is the primary development environment — not a side tool, but the core of how engineers ship. Our stack is Python, FastAPI, PydanticAI, React, TypeScript, Postgres/Supabase, and AWS, with a standing mandate to simplify wherever complexity isn't earning its keep. Engineers own significant surface area and focus their human attention on architecture, product judgement, and the parts of the business AI can't do for them yet.

Our hiring process

We assess the work, not the credentials. We're most interested in things you've shipped — particularly systems you've owned end-to-end at small companies, and AI-native products where coding agents were genuinely central to your workflow. Interviews are a conversation about real problems, not whiteboard puzzles. We move quickly when the fit is right.