Careers at Hie
Build better systems. Become a better engineer.
Hie is a technical consultancy based in Harrogate. We design, build and manage the backend systems businesses depend on, across cloud, data and software.
We are early in our journey as a company, but not in our careers. Hie has been built by people who spent years designing, fixing and running production systems, and who wanted to create the sort of technical company they would choose to work for themselves.
We are building a focused team of very capable people rather than an organisation full of layers, hand-offs and narrow job descriptions.
Hie is run by engineers. The people who recommend a solution are the people who build it and live with it afterwards, and nobody here is paid commission on what a customer buys. You will never be sent to justify something somebody else sold.
That is not a temporary state of affairs while we are young. As we grow, commercial roles will support the technical team and our customers, rather than shape technical recommendations around sales targets.
Design it. Build it. Live with it.
One of the quickest ways to become a better engineer is to see what happens to your decisions after they reach production.
The people who design systems here are involved in building them, and the people who build them stay close enough to see how they actually behave. That changes how you think. You learn which clever ideas become maintenance problems, which shortcuts were worth taking, where cost really comes from, and what makes a system easy for the next person to understand.
It is also why we work across cloud, databases, data and software rather than passing problems between departments. Following a problem to wherever the answer lives is the job, not an exception to it.
The work itself
Most of what we do falls into one of three shapes.
Customers come to us with an Azure estate that has grown organically for years. The cost is rising faster than the value, nobody can explain what half of it does, and the people responsible inherited it rather than designed it. The job is to understand it properly, simplify it, and leave it in a state the customer's own team can run.
Or a system is unreliable. Performance is inconsistent, incidents repeat, and previous fixes addressed symptoms. That work is diagnostic before it is anything else: SQL Server performance, application behaviour under real load, and the gap between what the monitoring says and what is actually happening.
Or a data platform has quietly become several data platforms, each built for a good reason at the time. Consolidating those without breaking the reporting everyone depends on is careful technical work that makes an enormous difference to the people who live with the result.
Our case studies describe some of this in more detail, and they are a more honest preview of the work than anything we could write here.
Technology without the theatre
We like new technology, but not because it is new.
We use modern platforms, recent product features, automation and AI where they make the result better. We also expect people to understand enough to recognise when the accepted answer, the vendor recommendation or the AI-generated solution is wrong.
We care about systems that are simple, reliable, maintainable, cost-effective and easy for somebody else to understand. The technology will keep changing. Good technical judgement will not stop being valuable.
Day to day, that currently means C#, Azure, SQL Server and dbt, alongside other technologies where they suit the problem better.
More than customer work
Aireforge builds SysOptics, software that turns technical knowledge into automated checks, analysis and continuous improvement. Because Hie and Aireforge work closely, our engineers can feed what they learn from real customer systems directly into the tools we use.
We build internal software for the same reason we automate anything else. If something we do repeatedly can be turned into a tool, a document or a check that runs on its own, we would rather spend the time once.
What we expect in return
We give people considerable autonomy, and we expect them to manage their time, keep their commitments and involve the team without needing supervision to do it.
Nobody knows everything. We would far rather someone said so than bluffed. We expect people to challenge ideas, have their own challenged, admit mistakes and change their mind when there is a better answer.
We also look after each other. We want people who can work deeply on their own but understand that the team comes first when somebody needs help.
The individual role pages go into how this works in practice, including how we handle out-of-hours, disagreement and being wrong. We would rather be specific there than list values here.
Roles we are hiring for
Business Operations Lead
Commercial, Finance, Governance & Company OperationsFor someone who wants to run the commercial, financial and governance side of a growing consultancy, working closely with the founder and technical team.
How we hire
We want recruitment to resemble the work rather than an exam.
You will speak to people you would actually work with and complete a practical technical exercise designed to show us how you approach a problem, investigate what you do not know and respond when your first answer is not quite right.
You will also have plenty of opportunity to question us. This needs to be the right move for both sides.
We ask for written answers alongside your CV because we want to understand your judgement, not how polished an AI tool can make an application. We read them properly. Please write them yourself.
Practical things
We work together in our Harrogate office for roughly three days each week. Hybrid working gives people flexibility, but there is enormous value in solving difficult problems, teaching each other and throwing ideas around in the same room.
You should already live within daily commuting distance of Harrogate. Our roles are not suitable for anyone who would need to relocate, and we do not provide visa sponsorship.
We are still a growing company. Rather than fill this page with a long list of token perks, we would rather invest in the people, technology and working environment that help us do better work.
We hire based on capability, potential and how you work with others. We welcome applications from anyone who meets the requirements of the role.