Work at Blackthorn Labs.
Blackthorn Labs is an applied research and development firm. Our team builds agent systems, document pipelines and verification gates for businesses and for government, and studies how those systems actually behave in a standing research program of its own.
Our team is not running a posting for every seat on this page. One is open now. The others are filled when the right person turns up, and our team reads every application that arrives, whether a seat is open that week or not.
What our team reads first is the work. Send a repository, a document, a recording, a dial log, a paper, a drawing, or whatever else shows what you can actually do.
Appointment setter
Call insurance agency owners from the desk list and book twenty minute walkthroughs.
Open nowResearch engineer, agent systems
Build the agent architectures the laboratory studies, then break them on purpose.
Open to the right personApplied researcher, verification
Turn a claim about a system into a computed check that refuses the build when it fails.
Open to the right personDocument systems engineer
Extraction, provenance and signing for paperwork that has to be right the first time.
Open to the right personCapture and proposal writer
RFQ and RFP responses for the government lane, written to the solicitation and nothing else.
Open to the right personOpen now
Appointment setter
The whole job is conversations with owners. Our team hands you the desk with the business, the owner's name and title, the staff count, two facts read off the firm's own site and the question to ask already on the row. You dial, you press the outcome, and you book the walkthrough on the desk, which sends the confirmation and the calendar invite from the server.
You own dials, connects, conversations that run past two minutes, booked walkthroughs, and the prospect's own words in the notes. You never quote a price, negotiate, promise an outcome, or argue past one answer to an objection. A price question goes to Kyle. A hard no is thanked and logged.
After a ramp the target is 300 dials and 5 booked walkthroughs a week. Pay is per booked walkthrough that Kyle holds, with a bonus on anything that reaches a paid audit, and commission comes ahead of base.
What to send
- ·A recording of you on the phone, cold, with the outcome.
- ·A dial log or a report from whatever desk you worked, with the connects and the conversations on it.
- ·The two sentences you would open with on an insurance agency owner.
Open to the right person
Research engineer, agent systems
The laboratory compares architectures side by side on planning, tool use, state, observability, recovery from failure and cost, with expensive intelligence spent only where intelligence is required. The subject under study is the firm's own agent desk, which researches organizations and drafts correspondence under written gates with a person approving what leaves.
The seat owns an architecture end to end: the harness, the evaluation that can fail it, and the write up that says what held and what did not. Our team cares more about what you can prove about a system than about which framework you reached for.
What to send
- ·An agent or a pipeline you built, with the evaluation that proved it worked.
- ·The failure you did not expect, and what you changed because of it.
- ·A paper or a write up, if you have one.
Open to the right person
Applied researcher, verification
Every claim this firm makes about its own work is supposed to be a check that runs, and a check that cannot fail is treated as no check at all. The page you are reading was refused by its own build until the copy passed the gates that read it.
The seat owns the gates: what they read, the bad input that proves they can refuse, the canary that proves they are still looking at something, and the scope that keeps the stakes inside the glob. This is adversarial work done against our own systems before anyone outside sees them.
What to send
- ·A test, a gate or a fuzzer you wrote that caught something real.
- ·A case where a check reported green and the thing underneath was broken, and how you found out.
- ·A review of something in public that overstates what it measured.
Open to the right person
Document systems engineer
Institutional paperwork is where the firm's applied work meets the part of a business that cannot absorb an error. The lane covers reading documents that were never built to be read by a machine, keeping provenance for every value that reaches a page, and issuing executed documents that reproduce byte for byte on a second build.
The seat owns the pipeline from the inbound file to the signed record, including what happens when the input is a photograph of a fax.
What to send
- ·A pipeline you built that read messy documents, and how you measured whether it read them correctly.
- ·The hardest input you handled, and what you did about the part you could not handle.
- ·Anything you built around signing, audit trails or provenance.
Open to the right person
Capture and proposal writer
The government lane needs responses that answer the solicitation in its own order and language, with every claim traceable to something the firm can show. Our founder spent three years supporting RFQ and RFP responses at a United States defense vehicle manufacturer, so the standard here is the one that lane actually holds.
The seat owns the compliance matrix, the narrative, and the discipline of writing only what the firm can stand behind.
What to send
- ·A response you wrote, redacted as far as you need to.
- ·A compliance matrix you built.
- ·The award or the debrief, if the work has one.
- ·The work comes first. Our team reads the repository, the document, the recording or the log before it reads the list of places you worked.
- ·Every application lands in Kyle Cleary's inbox and he reads it himself.
- ·A seat marked open to the right person has no closing date, and what you send is kept on file against the week it opens.
- ·Our team replies to the applications it wants to take further.
- ·Our team will tell you plainly what is built and what is not, and expects the same from you.
Send your work.
Send links. Our team will ask for files if it needs them.
It arrived.
Kyle has it. If our team wants to take it further you will hear from him.