Come join us! We have lots of fabulous work at the moment with not-for-profits, charities and organisations working for social good. We are looking to expand our team of developers with a view to you becoming fully fledged members of our co-operative a little further down the line.

We want diversity and encourage applications from all backgrounds.

Who are we looking for?

Initially employed on a contract/freelance basis these questions should give you a good idea of the type of skills we are looking for. If you can answer positively to most of these questions, contact us!

  • Do you have experience with WordPress? Laravel? AngularJS?
  • Are you highly adept with PHP and JS?
  • Can you do front-end (styling/CSS/Sass)? Do you want to?
  • Can you do infrastructure (eg AWS, Ansible)? Do you want to?
  • Do you have experience and an active interest in data?
  • How good are you at picking up new languages/frameworks/technologies?
  • Are you interested in knowing how a business runs?
  • Are you interested in co-ops?

We are looking for people who want to learn, want to innovate, want to collaborate and be a part of a team that really supports each other and tries to make a difference.

It’s not just a job

We don’t have traditional job roles at Outlandish because a co-op requires all the members to participate in the running of the organisation.

We want to recruit developers who we can support to become business owners (members of the co-operative), delivering value to the business in the best way you can. This might be predominantly writing code, business development, project management, attending events or even finance.

We have an immediate need for developer skills, but this doesn’t mean you have to stay that way, or only use those skills.

Pay & benefits

Pay can be a deal breaker, we know that. We try to pay fairly but know there is no entirely fair system. We are completely open about what everyone is paid and do have some rules we abide by. We have a 1:3 pay ratio which means no one is paid more than 3 times the lowest paid collaborator on an ongoing basis. We don’t generally pay at the market rate, but we do consider ourselves to be paid well and consider these as significant benefits that you get as soon as you start working with us;

  • an opportunity to meaningfully contribute and change the way we are working. We are a worker co-operative and exist to not only deliver impactful work to the world, but also to be a great place to work for everyone. That’s something that needs everyone’s contribution.
  • regular on the job training and learning is encouraged for all who work at Outlandish. Collaborators  are encouraged to attend formal training sessions we set up. These are often around improving communication skills. For example, we recently took everyone on a solutions focussed training day.
  • we are friends at Outlandish and always encourage non-work activities. These include lunches for all those in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a communal voluntary lunch on Wednesdays in Space4 
  • we support flexible ways of working wherever possible (although do require some face to face office time at the start of our relationship and regular visits to the office).
  • when profit-making we distribute profits so that all collaborators (our name for the regular freelancers we work with) can choose to support projects for charities and projects they believe in and who don’t have the funds they need..

Type of Work

The projects we have worked on since being founded in 2010 cover a huge range of languages, frameworks and technologies, but our favoured projects are either WordPress- or Laravel-based. We generally use Laravel for data-centric tools, and WordPress whenever there’s a need for a CMS, but we’re able to combine the two to deliver a WordPress-backed website centred around a lot of data (e.g. audiencefinder.org, which also incorporates an AngularJS frontend).

However, we’re pragmatic about the technologies that we use on any given project, and don’t try to shoehorn them into the WordPress/Laravel shape when that’s not suitable.

Should you like us and we like you, you will be offered a 10 day paid trial (office based if possible) where we both get to test the waters and see how it goes. This will be shadowing at first on real project work and transitioning to you delivering valuable work to clients as soon as you are able. After the 10 day trial the tech team will make an assessment and we will ask you to assess us and the outcome of those assessments will determine the next steps.

We initially hire everyone as a freelancer so that both you and us get a feel for how the collaboration is going. We’ll be able to give you a good idea of how many hours we can give you once we understand what skills you have and match you to the projects and work we have available.

How to apply

If you are interested in talking more, please send an email to people@outlandish.com giving your answers to the questions above, your expectation on day rate/pay and an idea of your availability.

We’ll initially send you a code test which should take approximately 4 hours to complete. If we think your skills match what we’re looking for we’ll invite you in for an interview and to meet some of the team.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Absolutely no agencies please.