This is a personal blog, so let me be direct about it.

People read something here, decide they want in, and then cannot work out where to send it. The company has a careers page and it does its job. This page is the other thing — what we actually need, where to send yourself, and how we decide. Written by the person who makes most of those decisions.

What we need people for

Not job titles. The problems.

Platform engineering. We operate as principal on both sides of an advertising business, which means the hard parts are settlement, verification and compliance rather than targeting. High-scale decisioning, workflow orchestration, verifying that a thing actually happened before anybody is billed or paid. If systems where correctness matters more than cleverness appeal to you, this is the centre of the company.

Infrastructure and architecture. We run our own infrastructure in India, on purpose. There is real work in making that reliable, observable and cheap enough to be defensible.

Interfaces. Two consoles that people use all day — advertisers planning campaigns, creators deciding whether to accept an offer. Most ad-tech interfaces are hostile. Ours do not have to be.

Design and brand. We have a design system and six properties running on it. The work is keeping that coherent while it grows, and making interactive formats that people choose to enter.

Research. Two strands: advertising research — measurement, attention, what actually works — and media and mental health, which is where we study what interactive formats do to the people who receive them. Both run through State of Ads and both get published whatever they find.

Marketing and go-to-market. Explaining a business whose central claim is a negative — that we do not collect data about viewers — to an industry that assumes everybody does. Harder than it sounds, and more interesting.

Finance, governance and commercial. Funding, invoicing, withholding, cross-border payment, and the reconciliation that keeps the two sides of our book insulated from each other. Deeply unglamorous and completely load-bearing.

Operations and people. Small company, wide remits, and the person who holds the middle together matters more here than at any size where there is slack.

Community and campus programmes. HFW is a real community with people in it who are early in their careers. Running that well is a job, not a side project.

If your discipline is not on that list and you think we are missing something, tell me. That has happened and it worked out.

Where to head

Different things go to different places, and sending it to the wrong one mostly means it waits longer.

If you want to…	Go to
Apply for a role	HFW on Discord — every opening is posted and applied for there. [Join](https://discord.com/invite/6qZe3tvnWB)
Be around before you apply	The HFW community — Discord and the WhatsApp groups by discipline
Run a campus community	The HFW campus ambassador programme
Do research with us	State of Ads — research@stateofads.com
Write something we publish	Contribute, on Blowtrumpet or State of Ads
Talk about a brief, a partnership or sponsorship	The company, not me — info@blowtrumpet.com
Ask about investing	ir@blowtrumpet.com
Tell me I am wrong about something I wrote	Here. arjun@blowtrumpet.com

Writing to me directly about a role is not a shortcut, and I will forward it to the people who run hiring. It is not a penalty either. It is just slower.

How we hire

Everything is on Discord. Not because it is fashionable, but because the people we want to hire are already in communities and not in an applicant tracking system. Openings are posted there, applications come back there, and you can see the company being itself before you commit to anything.

We ask for a Statement of Purpose. What draws you to advertising and technology, when you started doing whatever you do, where you want to be in three to five years, and how this fits. It is not a formality — it is the part I read first. A good one has got people interviews that their CV would not have.

We do not ask for marks, percentile, backlog history, a photograph, your family’s details, or what you are currently paid. If a form ever asks you for those, it is a mistake and I would like to know about it.

The process, honestly. A conversation rather than a panel. Then something real — a brief, a problem, a piece of work with actual constraints, scoped to a few hours and not a free weekend. Then a conversation about what you did and why. Where the work is substantial enough to be work, it is paid, and that is agreed in writing before you start.

Three ways in, depending on where you are. An apprenticeship if you are learning the craft and want it taught properly. The Sprint Fellowship — twelve weeks, live projects from the first week, mentorship from people who do this professionally, and a real route to a full-time role. An internship if you are studying and want scoped work with an owner and a deadline. Different commitments, same principle: you do the work, and the hiring follows from what you did.

What I am actually looking for

There is a line people like about the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary being a little extra. I do not believe it. The difference is not a little extra — it is a different relationship with the work entirely, and you can usually tell within an hour of talking to someone.

What I look for: people who finish things. People who can hold an argument about their own work without taking it personally, and who change their mind when they lose. People who notice the unglamorous problem and fix it rather than routing around it. People who can explain what they built to someone who does not share their vocabulary.

What I do not weigh heavily: where you studied, how senior your last title was, or how polished the CV is. We have hired people whose CVs would not survive a filter and it has gone well.

Two honest caveats

We are small and in closed testing. We hire slowly, we do not always have an opening in the area you want, and timing matters more than it should. If you do not hear back it is more likely to be about us than about you — and if it has been a while, write again. That is not rude.

I am biased about this company. Obviously. Everything on this page is the view of the person who started it, which is worth reading accordingly. The people already here will give you a straighter answer about what it is like, and I would rather you asked them — they are in the community and nobody has been told what to say.

[Join HFW on Discord →](https://discord.com/invite/6qZe3tvnWB)

*These are my own views — see [About](/about). The Edit is the founder’s blog of Blowtrumpet Technologies · Delhi. All hiring, reviews and HR functions are managed by Blowtrumpet.*