Chapter 00 — Working here

We hire slowly.
Then we leave you alone
and let you build.

Small team. Real ownership. No standups for the sake of standups. If you've ever been told "this performance gain isn't possible" and proved someone wrong on a weekend — keep reading.

The honest pitch

We are a small team in Prague rebuilding JPEG 2000 for one platform. The work is specific, the feedback loop is short, and there is nowhere to hide bad code. If that sounds tiring, we are not for you. If it sounds like a relief, read on.

We don't have a "growth team", a "developer relations" department, or a Slack with 40 channels. We have one repo, one product, and customers who notice when latency moves by 2 ms.

Small team

You'll know everyone's name. Your code goes to production this month, not next quarter.

Remote, mostly

EU-friendly hours. Quarterly meet-ups in Prague — beer optional, espresso usually involved.

Real Apple kit

The latest Mac you actually need to do the job — Pro, Max, Ultra, Vision Pro included.

Deep work

Two meetings a week, max. The rest is yours. We measure shipped code, not calendar fullness.

Health & time off

Private health cover, generous paid leave, and the unwritten rule that nobody messages you on Sunday.

Conference budget

If WWDC, SIGGRAPH, or RSNA matters to your work, we send you. No approval theatre.

Open roles

Senior Metal / GPU engineer

Full-time Remote / Prague Senior comp, EU bands

Own the wavelet kernels. Make them faster, generation by generation. You'll spend real time in Instruments, not in Jira.

You probably have

  • Years of GPU shading work — Metal preferred, CUDA/OpenCL respected.
  • Real intuition for tile memory, threadgroup sizing, occupancy.
  • Image processing or codec experience, even informal.
  • Comfort with C++ and MSL. Swift is a bonus, not a religion.

Nice extras

  • Touched JPEG 2000 or any wavelet codec before.
  • Have written something that ran on M-series and surprised you.
  • Read papers because you want to, not because you have to.
Apply →

Solutions engineer — medical imaging

Full-time Hybrid Prague / EU travel Senior comp, EU bands

Sit between us and the PACS world. Help radiology teams adopt MetaWave without us pretending we understand their workflow better than they do.

You probably have

  • Several years close to PACS / RIS / DICOM in production.
  • FDA 510(k) or CE-mark exposure.
  • The patience to sit with a radiologist for two hours and ask good questions.
  • Decent technical writing — your docs end up in submissions.
Apply →

Performance engineer (Apple Silicon)

Full-time Remote Senior comp, EU bands

Own the benchmark farm. Tell us, with evidence, where the 2 ms went. Help every chip from M1 to M5 get a fair fight.

You probably have

  • Strong systems C/C++/Swift, comfortable in a profiler.
  • Genuine understanding of CPU/GPU memory behaviour.
  • The discipline to set up reproducible benchmarks (and the temperament to refuse non-reproducible ones).
Apply →

visionOS / spatial engineer

Full-time Remote Senior comp, EU bands

Make 8K stereo decode feel instant on Vision Pro. The hard parts are latency and motion-to-photon, not pretty UI.

You probably have

  • Real-time rendering background — VR/AR or game engines.
  • visionOS or similar XR platform experience.
  • Swift & Metal in equal measure.
Apply →

How to apply

Email careers@htmeta.dev. Address it to a person if you can find them on the blog — we like that.

What to send

  • CV or LinkedIn — short version is fine. We don't count pages.
  • Code — GitHub, a gist, anything we can read.
  • One paragraph — about an optimisation you're proud of. No corporate prose.
  • Optional — a paper, a blog post, an obscure benchmark thread you started.

How the interview goes

  1. 30 minutes — informal call with one of us.
  2. Technical chat — your domain, our domain, where they meet.
  3. Take-home — a small Metal / codec problem. We give you a week, expect 4–6 hours of work.
  4. Team round — talk through your solution, then two hours of architecture and tradeoffs.
  5. Founder chat — we tell you what's hard, you ask us what's broken.

End to end: about two to three weeks. We won't ghost.

Internships

We take one or two interns each summer. Real work, paid properly, code that ends up in releases. Mostly we look for graduate students in CS, EE, or computational imaging.

  • Length: 10–12 weeks
  • Where: Prague, with travel allowance
  • Apply: careers+intern@htmeta.dev

What we believe

Numbers, not adjectives

"Fast" means nothing. 7,856 FPS at 1920×1080 means something. We talk in numbers.

Depth over breadth

You don't have to know everything. Be very good at one thing and curious about the next.

Ship the smaller thing

Small releases, fast feedback. Big-bang launches are how good code goes to die.

Customers are colleagues

Our users are radiologists and broadcast engineers. They notice 2 ms. So do we.