Work with us.

Creative Machines is hiring. We are a small Hong Kong team building Ostler – a local-first personal AI that is, unapologetically, an alternative to Big Tech. No cloud data pipelines. No harvesting-as-a-service. Your data stays yours. The machines run on your desk at home.

We are looking for people who believe this is worth building, and who have the technical teeth to build it properly.

What we care about

• Local-first is an architecture, not a slogan. If your instinct when something does not work is "let us just stick it on a server," this is not the right team for you.
• Engineering taste. We use AI agents heavily – they are how one of us ships what used to take four. But every line that ends up in a release is reviewed by a human who takes the quality personally.
• Product sensibility. We design what we build. The best engineers we have worked with can sketch a UI and then ship it.
• Honest disagreement. Polite consensus ships worse products. Say what you think.
• An opinion on privacy. You do not have to be a cryptographer, but you should be able to explain why it matters.

What we do not care about

• Which university you went to.
• Whether you have "20 years of enterprise experience" (we would actually rather you did not – enterprise habits are hard to unlearn).
• Clever interview puzzles. We look at what you have shipped.

Roles

We are keeping this page deliberately light while we work out exactly who we need next. If any of the following sounds like you, get in touch:

• Swift / SwiftUI engineer with an eye for macOS and iOS polish.
• Rust engineer comfortable with agent frameworks and local-inference plumbing.
• Python data engineer who enjoys wrangling messy personal-data exports into clean graph structures.
• Designer who can take a domain concept and give it a tactile, trustworthy product surface.

Not a perfect match? Still write – we are more interested in what you have built than in matching a job description.