OPEN SEATS3 FOUNDING SEATS · İSTANBUL · IN PERSON · 2026–2027 EQUITYMEANINGFUL · 4-YEAR VEST · 1-YEAR CLIFF · EARLY EXERCISE CASHFAIR FOR PRE-SEED · WILL IMPROVE WHEN WE RAISE CONTACTJOBS@BULUTLABS.COM · FOUNDER REPLIES IN 48 HOURS
Bulut Labs/Open seats

Three founding seats. İstanbul. 2026.

We have no fancy careers page because we have no fancy headcount. There are three founding seats open, all in person in İstanbul, all reporting directly to the founder, all with meaningful equity. We will hire one or two of these in 2026 and the rest in 2027 — slowly, on taste. If you are the right shape for one of them, the path here is short.

Open seats 3 founding Location İstanbul · in person Stage pre-seed · honest about it Median time-to-offer 21 days
§ 01 — What you should know first

Five honest reasons. Five honest warnings.

We do not run a careers funnel. We try to give every candidate enough information to self-select out before applying. The text below is a deliberate attempt at that.

Five reasons.

  • Founding-team equity. The first three hires are founders in everything but title. Equity will reflect that.
  • Five years of conviction. You are not joining a vibe. You are joining a thesis somebody has been refining for half a decade.
  • No politics yet. No PMs. No skip-level reviews. No quarterly performance theatre. The whole company fits in a small room.
  • A real research thesis. Physical-world foundation models is not a trend that will burn out next quarter. It is the next decade.
  • İstanbul. If you have not lived here, ask the founder for the founder's-life-in-İstanbul brief. It is honest, including the rough edges.

Five warnings.

  • Pre-seed cash. Cash compensation is fair for a bootstrapped pre-seed company in 2026. It is not Big Tech. It will improve when we raise. Equity is the upside.
  • No safety net. If we do not raise our first round in 2027 the company has a real funding cliff. We are honest about that risk.
  • In-person, İstanbul. Remote will not work for a founding role. We need to be in the same room while we figure out what this is.
  • Ownership expected. "I was waiting for direction" is not an answer that survives long here. If something is broken and you can fix it, you fix it.
  • Slow milestones. First public model is targeted for 2027. If you need a launch every quarter to feel productive, the patience here will frustrate you.
§ 02 — Three founding seats

Three positions. Each a founder in everything but title.

All three roles include relocation support if needed, visa sponsorship, and direct reporting to the founder. Apply with a CV, two recent things you are proud of, and a brief note on why this thesis appeals to you.

What each role looks like in detail

— 01 · 2026 PRIORITY

Co-founder · research lead

Research-minded co-founder with deep multimodal-ML experience. You will lead the BULUT-1 model line — architecture choices, training strategy, paper publication discipline. Title flexible. Equity meaningful. Scope wide.

PHD-CALIBRE OR EQUIVALENT · 5+ YR INDUSTRY ML
— 02 · 2026 OR 2027

Founding systems engineer

Owns stratus end to end. CUDA-comfortable, distributed-training-curious, allergic to bullshit benchmark numbers. Will architect how every future model we ship is trained, with outsized influence on the engineering culture.

CUDA · NCCL · MEGATRON-FAMILIAR · STRONG OPINIONS
— 03 · 2027 PRIORITY

Founding data engineer

Builds, calibrates and operates the multimodal capture pipeline. Spends a meaningful percentage of year one in the field, on rooftops, in vehicles, with sensors. Hardware-friendly software engineers welcome — bonus points for prior calibration work.

SENSORS · ROS2 · CALIBRATION · TIME-SYNC
§ 03 — Interview process

Three weeks. Five stages. The same for everyone.

We publish our process so candidates know exactly what to prepare for. We have no prior process to compare against — but we will hold ourselves to the version below.
DAY 0–3 · INTRO CALL

30 minutes. Two-way.

You meet the founder directly. We learn what you want; you learn what we are. Either side can say no without explanation. We expect most to.

DAY 4–10 · TAKE-HOME

4–6 hours of actual work.

A small, real problem from our backlog — paid (€500), capped at six hours of effort. You keep the IP if we do not hire you. Examples will be public on our GitHub once it goes live.

DAY 8–14 · TECHNICAL DEEP-DIVE

One interview · 90 minutes.

Architecture / paper deep-dive with the founder, or with a respected external collaborator if your domain is outside the founder's. No leetcode. No trick questions.

DAY 12–17 · ON-SITE

Half a day in İstanbul.

Lunch with the founder, a working session on the actual problem, and a relaxed conversation about what year three could look like. We pay flights and a hotel.

DAY 17–21 · DECISION & OFFER

Written offer within 72 hours.

We share our notes from every interview with you (yes, all of them). Compensation breakdown is itemised. We answer follow-up questions in writing. You have 14 days to decide.

§ 04 — Compensation & life

Pre-seed honest. Real equity. Slow theatre.

We are not Big Tech. We will not pretend to be. Below is what we can offer at this stage; what we cannot offer yet; and what we plan to add when we raise.
— PAY

Fair pre-seed cash

Roughly senior-IC İstanbul-market rates. Honest about it. Will improve materially when we raise our first institutional round.

— EQUITY

Meaningful founding equity

Founding-tier equity for the first three hires. 4-year vest, 1-year cliff. Early exercise enabled. ISO-style for non-Türkiye hires.

— HEALTH

Private cover

Premium private health insurance for you and dependents in Türkiye. We will match the EU/US standard once we can afford to.

— TIME

Minimum 25 days off

Plus public holidays. We require people to take at least 25 — burnout in year one is the most common reason early-stage hires leave.

— LEARNING

$3,000 / year

Conferences, courses, books, equipment. Modest by Big Tech standards, generous for a pre-seed company. Approval rarely required.

— RELOCATION

Up to ₺250,000

If you are moving to İstanbul. We will help with paperwork. Türkiye work permit handled by a labour lawyer we already use.

— SETUP

M-series MacBook + 4K monitor

Pre-installed, on your desk before day one. The chair is up to you.

— OFFICE

İstanbul, in person

Three days minimum at first. The point of the founding team is being in the room. Fully-remote is not on the table for these roles.

— FUTURE

What we will add post-raise

Better cash bands, parental leave matched to EU norms, 401k-equivalent retirement matching, off-sites that are not somebody's living room.

§ 05 — A day at Bulut

What working here will actually feel like.

There are no employees yet to ask, so this is the founder's honest projection of what the first year of the founding team will feel like — drafted before any of you arrive, so we can hold ourselves to it.

A typical Tuesday at Bulut Labs starts with the cluster — the founder is checking a single-node training run that started over the weekend. By 10 a.m. there is bread on the kitchen counter from someone's neighbourhood bakery, and an argument about whether expert-2 has collapsed again.

By lunch the argument is settled with a notebook plot. By 4 p.m. we are debugging a capture rig. By 6 p.m. one of us is at the rooftop terrace with a coffee; the other is on a call with a prospective design partner. By the time you log off, the run is at step 142k.

— founder's projection · drafted spring 2026

What will be true here

  • — The founder answers Slack. Sometimes too quickly.
  • — The cluster (such as it is) has a weekend on-call rotation that includes the founder.
  • — There will be a #book-club channel. People will actually read the books.
  • — Lunch is catered most days in İstanbul, until cash discipline says otherwise.
  • — Nobody works on slides for slides' sake. Internal documents are docs, not decks.
  • — Researchers and engineers are paid on the same band. So is design when we eventually hire it.
  • — The office library is empty for now. Anyone joining can buy the first ten books with the company card.
  • — We will fail gracefully when we fail, and we will fail at least once before 2028.

Send us your best work.

A CV is fine. A GitHub link is better. A short note explaining what you want to build with us is best of all. The founder reads every application personally and replies in 5 business days.