At Altura, we're at the forefront of how products get made and teams are built, and those two are inseparable. How we work matters as much as what we ship, and who we hire decides both. Who you hire, and how you keep them, is one of the most important investments a company can make. We treat it that way.

The team you build decides what you can validate, ship, and learn from. We hire for where we are, with people who make the next stage possible. The right person is excellent at the work this stage actually requires. By doing that work well, they sharpen the problem, raise the standard, and pull the company forward with them.

Altura is at a very specific stage of growth. We're defining a new category of software. The bid management industry is relatively underserved technologically, the challenges are unsolved, the thinking has to be original, and the potential to change how our industry works is enormous. We're still validating, still adjusting, still learning what world-class looks like for what we're building. That rewards a particular kind of hire: T-shaped generalists who can move across functions, people whose judgement expands our thinking rather than locking us into last year's plan, people who care more about whether we're solving the right problem than about defending the role they were hired into.

Hiring is something we continuously refine. As the work evolves, what excellence looks like evolves with it, and so does the kind of hire we're looking for. We treat that ongoing recalibration as the work, not a distraction from it.

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Our perspective on hiring.

Hiring well matters more than hiring fast. Each person who joins should raise the bar for the next one. We've tested the alternative, speed at the cost of fit, and the cost compounds for a long time afterwards.

So we pay close attention to what actually matters at our stage.

• ‍Ownership over job titles. The people who do well here care about impact, not scope. They don't anchor on what the role description said when they joined; they pay attention to what's getting in the way and pull on it. Titles are useful shorthand, but they're not the unit we hire for.

• Results over hours. The outcome is what we're watching, not the hours. Long hours aren't a signal of commitment, and short ones aren't a signal of slack. What matters is whether the work moves, whether the bar is being held, and whether someone can tell the difference between motion and progress.

• Growth appetite. We hire people who want to be stretched. The work changes faster than any role description can keep up with, and the people who thrive here treat that as the appeal. They want to be doing things a year from now they couldn't do today.

• AI fluency. We expect people to use AI to go 10x, with taste and judgement about what they produce. That means treating the tools as collaborators and knowing when they help and when they don't. AI raises the floor on output; the scarce thing is the judgement to use it well.

What you can expect from us.

We keep the process tight on purpose. Most roles have four conversations in total, and we don't add rounds for the sake of consensus or to gather more information. We design each stage to give us what we need the first time. Most processes run four to six weeks from first conversation to offer, depending on scheduling.

Candidates who invest time in our process deserve honesty in return. That means feedback at every step, not only if you don't advance. At the offer stage, we'll be direct about business performance, what we're optimistic about, and what we're working through. A lot of companies are vague or overly optimistic. We'd rather you have an accurate picture.

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A note on fit.

Altura isn't trying to be the right place for everyone. We're a small team building a product designed to stay relevant as SaaS gets rewritten. The way software gets made, sold, and used is changing every quarter. There's a lot of ownership here. The company is small enough that what you build is visible, and early enough that what you decide actually sticks.

That sounds liberating, and it usually is. We value feedback: we ask for it, give it directly, and treat it as part of how we get better. What we don't value is red tape or bureaucracy. We want everyone here to feel empowered to act like an owner: making calls without waiting for permission, and trusting the people around them to do the same.

Some people find that energising. Others find it disorienting. Both reactions are reasonable, but only one of them describes someone who's going to do their best work here.

We're a startup, we aren't profitable yet, and that shapes everything: the ambition, the stakes, the focus. The people who do well here are the ones for whom that's the appeal, not the asterisk.