Join before it's obvious.
Four founders are rebuilding a production B2B marketplace from the spine up — Turkish manufacturing, made buyable end to end. No roles are open today. This page exists so that when they open, we already know you.
Or write to careers@sultana.express — it reaches all four founders.
- 649-step build plan · 304 steps done
- 125,000 lines of Go · 106,000 lines of tests
- 52 merge-blocking CI checks
- 44 architecture decision records · a 1.65-million-word plan
Counted, not estimated — as of 2026-08-01.
01
Four founders. One team. The whole thing.
SultanaExpress is four people: Louis Loubes (CEO), Abdullah Kahvecioglu (CTO), Leonard Loubes (COO), Tatiana Loubes (CFO). No agency, no outsourced dev shop. One team writes the plan, the backend, the web apps, the infrastructure and the design system.
We have done this before. We built and ran this marketplace as a production iOS app. Then we audited our own system line by line — 106 tables, 341 stored procedures, 687 row-level-security policies, 228 catalogued features — and found real defects: money math in client-side floats, business rules buried in the database. So we started over, properly.
The rebuild is a 145-phase plan with 649 steps. 304 are done — hardest half first: the ledger, tenant isolation, the contract infrastructure. We say "four people" with pride, not apology. Small is how the bar stays where we set it.
02
"We hire the best" — defined, not declared
Every company says it hires the best. The sentence is empty until you define the bar. Ours is written into the build system — three examples:
Accessibility is a merge gate
WCAG 2.2 AA is checked in CI on every pull request. A screen that fails contrast or keyboard navigation does not merge. Not a backlog ticket — a failed build.
Tests at parity with code
125,000 lines of production Go ship with 106,000 lines of tests — 1,666 test functions, run with the race detector on, coverage measured with generated code excluded. The bar measures discipline, not volume.
Everything is written down first
44 architecture decision records and a 1.65-million-word plan existed before the features they describe. A decision you disagree with has a document you can challenge. Tribal knowledge is banned by construction.
Turkish talent, on purpose
We are a Turkish company, and we will hire in Türkiye first — deliberately. Turkish engineers, designers and operators already ship for the best teams in the world; too often from abroad, or for a foreign payroll. We are building this platform from İstanbul, to the standard described above, and we want the people who want to do that from here.
03
What the work is actually like
Four things you should know before betting a career on us.
The invariants are executable
Money cannot be a float — a CI lint fails the build. The ledger cannot be updated — SQL grants and a trigger refuse it. An event cannot fire on a rolled-back transaction — it is written in the same transaction or not at all. A module cannot import another module's tables — the linter blocks the merge. "We should really…" has already been converted into "the build fails if you don't."
Real distributed-systems problems, at a graspable size
Transactional outbox and relay. Idempotent consumers with dead-letter queues. Search projections rebuilt with an alias swap. Double-entry accounting with multi-currency FX. A realtime gateway that re-runs full authorization per connection. All in one Go codebase with in-process calls — the interesting problems without the service-mesh yak-shaving.
You run what you build
Our own PostgreSQL, Redis, NATS JetStream, Typesense, MinIO and Grafana stack on our own Kubernetes — the production topology is specified for HA k3s on Hetzner ARM, the development cluster mirrors it today, and everything ships by GitOps (Actions → GHCR → Argo CD). If you want to learn how the systems you depend on actually behave, instead of reading a vendor status page, this is that job.
AI in the loop, honestly scoped
Four read-only AI reviewers check every slice — security, correctness, API contract, privacy. 443 passes so far; 2,650 findings caught and fixed before merge, by design. And a rule enforced in the build itself: an AI check can never become a required merge gate. Deterministic CI is the only authority. You get the leverage without the hand-waving.
Who thrives here
People who read the spec before writing code. Who find double-entry bookkeeping or an idempotency key genuinely interesting. Who want their decisions preserved in an ADR, not lost in a chat thread. Who prefer guardrails that catch mistakes over unlimited freedom and unlimited blame.
Compensation
Competitive, transparent. We publish no bands yet — when we make you an offer, every number will be in writing, like everything else here.
04
The roles we will open
None of these is open today — status on all eight: FUTURE — COLLECTING INTEREST. They are the hires we plan around the September 2026 beta and after. Pick the ones that fit you in the talent-pool form below; when a role opens, the pool hears before any job board does.
01Sales (TR/EU)
Bring Turkish manufacturers onto the platform and EU buyers across the corridor. You are the first sales hire: you build the pipeline, the playbook and the evidence loop that feeds product. What you sell is specific — a platform where the server refuses a sub-minimum order and bulk production cannot start without an approved sample.
What you'll own
- The supplier early-access pipeline in Türkiye — factory floors and export managers, not just inboxes.
- Buyer-side outreach to EU brands and boutiques sourcing custom production.
- The launch offer: three months free for suppliers, and the founding-supplier prize program.
- A written sales playbook — objections, proof points, honest answers about what is built and what is planned.
- The feedback loop: what factories actually need, filed as evidence, argued into the roadmap.
What we look for
- Native Turkish and fluent English; German or French is a plus.
- You have sold to manufacturers, exporters or B2B operators — and can name what worked.
- You are comfortable on a factory floor and in a procurement call, same day.
- You prefer demonstrating a refusal in the product to promising a feature that is not built.
Stack & context
Territory: Türkiye first, then EU. Base: İstanbul or remote in Türkiye, with travel. Tools: the platform itself, a clean pipeline, and a copy style that bans invented numbers.
02Marketing / Growth
Build-in-the-open is our marketing channel — nobody else in this category uses it. You own the cadence: dated updates, real numbers, two languages. The job is making discipline legible, not making noise.
What you'll own
- The /open changelog — dated entries, real counters, an update rhythm that survives busy weeks.
- Bilingual (EN/TR) content: the corridor story, the capability pages, the launch campaign for the September 2026 beta.
- The early-access funnels — supplier, buyer, talent — measured end to end with cookieless analytics.
- SEO on the topics we can win: sourcing from Türkiye, tech packs, AQL inspections, escrow mechanics.
- The claim discipline: every number dated, every status tagged, nothing invented — you enforce it, not just obey it.
What we look for
- You write plainly in English and Turkish — both native-grade, not translated.
- You read funnels and can defend a conclusion with numbers.
- B2B, developer or industrial marketing background — you have sold complicated things to busy people.
- Allergic to hype. Our copy style guide bans the word "revolutionary"; you should find that a relief.
Stack & context
Stack: a static-first Next.js site, Plausible analytics (cookieless), MailerLite, MDX in the repo. Publishing an update is a pull request.
03Mobile Engineer (Swift + Kotlin)
We ran a production iOS marketplace app once already — it lives on the legacy backend today. When this role opens, you retarget it to the new platform in SwiftUI and build Android from zero in Kotlin and Compose, both against the same generated API contract the web uses.
What you'll own
- The iOS retarget: a production SwiftUI app moved onto the new platform, screen by screen.
- Android, greenfield: Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, informed by everything the iOS app taught us.
- Mobile consumption of the 346-operation OpenAPI 3.1 contract — generated clients, no hand-rolled API layers.
- Offline behavior, retry and idempotency on flaky factory-floor networks.
- Both release pipelines, store review to rollout.
What we look for
- You have shipped on both platforms — or deep on one with real work on the other.
- SwiftUI and Compose, not just UIKit and XML memories.
- You treat an API contract as law; client-side workarounds offend you.
- Accessibility and localization on mobile (TR/EN, RTL-ready) are habits, not chores.
Stack & context
Stack: SwiftUI · Kotlin + Jetpack Compose · generated clients from OpenAPI 3.1. Context: mobile is a planned stage after the web platform ships; the existing iOS app is real and runs on the legacy backend.
04DevOps / Platform Engineer
Our infrastructure plan names its own gaps in writing: alerting not wired, backup cadence unpinned, in-cluster east-west security unowned. You take the estate from specified to production — and close the named gaps, in the open.
What you'll own
- The production cutover to HA k3s on Hetzner ARM — today the local cluster mirrors the specified topology.
- CloudNativePG Postgres operations: backups, restore drills, pinned RPO/RTO.
- The GitOps path: GitHub Actions → GHCR → Argo CD, with CI holding no cluster credentials.
- Alerting, SLOs and burn-rate rules on the Grafana LGTM stack — collection exists; the paging discipline is yours.
- In-cluster security: default-deny NetworkPolicies, mTLS, and the TLS/WAF/CDN decisions currently marked open.
What we look for
- You have run Kubernetes in production and been paged for it.
- Postgres operations: replication, backup verification, the restore you actually tested.
- GitOps conviction — you distrust any pipeline that can kubectl into prod.
- You write runbooks and postmortems without being asked.
Stack & context
Stack: k3s on Hetzner ARM · CloudNativePG · Redis · NATS JetStream · MinIO · Grafana LGTM · Actions → GHCR → Argo CD. Context: the plan's own infra self-assessment is written down gap by gap — that honesty is the job spec.
05Full-Stack Engineer (Go / Next.js)
Ship features end to end: a Go module behind a lint-enforced boundary, a contract-first endpoint, an event on the outbox, a Next.js slice in a token-gated design system. The buyer application is the next big build — you would be early on it.
What you'll own
- Vertical features: schema migration → sqlc queries → service → OpenAPI endpoint → Next.js UI.
- Event consumers on the NATS JetStream backbone — idempotent, deduplicated, DLQ-aware.
- The buyer-app build-out on the shared React Aria + Tailwind token system.
- Tests at near-parity with code — the current ratio is 106,000 test lines to 125,000 production lines; you keep it there.
- Your own ADRs: a boundary change needs a written decision, and you write it.
What we look for
- Strong in Go and TypeScript/React — or strong in one, with proof you cross stacks fast.
- You read the spec first and find that normal.
- Contract-first instincts: the OpenAPI document is the interface, and drift is a build failure.
- You treat accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) and i18n (EN/TR/AR, RTL) as part of done — here they gate the merge.
Stack & context
Stack: Go (chi · pgx/v5 · sqlc · goose) · PostgreSQL · NATS JetStream · Typesense · Next.js App Router (RSC-first) · React Aria · Tailwind v4 tokens · 52 merge-blocking CI checks.
06Security Engineer
The platform holds escrowed money and files that are the customer's intellectual property — the tech pack IS the product. You own the security posture end to end: threat models before features, gates in CI, and the named infrastructure gaps closed.
What you'll own
- The authorization model in practice: default-deny, AND-chained checks, cross-tenant reads answered with 404 — you review every new surface against it.
- The gate walls: govulncheck, SCA, secrets scanning, full-history TruffleHog — extended, tuned, kept failing closed.
- The named gaps: in-cluster east-west security, TLS/WAF/CDN decisions, pod-network encryption.
- The payments plane: webhook signature verification, idempotency, the reconciliation that catches gaps.
- Incident response and a disclosure process, written before the first incident.
What we look for
- Application security plus infrastructure security — you move between a Go diff and a NetworkPolicy.
- You threat-model features at design time and write it down.
- You know why a refresh-token family dies on first reuse — and you would have designed it that way.
- Pragmatic: gates that fail closed without crying wolf.
Stack & context
Context: no RLS — authorization lives in one tested Go package. One byte-enforced rule to defend: an AI check can never be a required merge gate. The deterministic wall is yours.
07AI Engineer
We already run AI in the loop, honestly: four read-only reviewers, 443 passes, 2,650 findings caught pre-merge — with a build-enforced rule that AI is never the only gate. You take that system further, and you decide, with evidence, where models belong in the product.
What you'll own
- The reviewer system: checklists, templates, and evaluation against the existing findings corpus.
- The injection problem: the repo names prompt injection as a live landmine; hardening it is yours.
- Evals as infrastructure — every AI behavior measured before it ships, monitored after.
- Product proposals: multilingual catalog normalization, RFQ-to-supplier matching — argued in an ADR, gated like everything else.
- The honesty budget: what the models cannot do gets written down too.
What we look for
- You have shipped LLM systems with eval suites, not vibes.
- You can name the failure modes — injection, non-determinism, sycophancy — and design around them.
- Engineering-first: Go, TypeScript or Python in production, not just notebooks.
- You read "AI is never the sole gate" as a feature, not a constraint.
Stack & context
Context: reviewer templates live in the planning repo; deterministic CI is the only merge authority, byte-enforced. As of 2026-08-01: 443 reviewer passes, 2,650 findings, 58 critical — all caught pre-merge.
08Product Designer (UX/UI)
Design for factory owners and sourcing managers in two languages — three with Arabic — inside a token system where accessibility gates the merge. The buyer experience is the next major surface; you shape it from the first screen.
What you'll own
- Buyer-app flows: search, RFQ, sample approval, order tracking — designed from research, not assumption.
- The design system's evolution: React Aria + Tailwind v4 tokens, every value named, no hardcodes — a lint enforces it.
- The visual-regression matrix: 2,822 approved reference screenshots across 3 widths × light/dark × LTR/RTL — your changes re-baseline it deliberately.
- Code-driven brand art: no stock photography exists on this site, by decision.
- Research with Turkish suppliers and EU buyers — sessions, not surveys.
What we look for
- Systems thinking: you design tokens and components, not just screens.
- Constraints read as protection to you: WCAG 2.2 AA in CI means your contrast decisions survive every future edit.
- You work in EN and TR (Arabic and RTL experience is a real plus).
- You prototype in code — or close enough to hand off without ambiguity.
Stack & context
Stack: React Aria Components · Tailwind v4 CSS-variable tokens · Playwright visual regression at 375/768/1280, light/dark, LTR/RTL. Mobile-first is enforced: a 375px overflow fails the build.
The talent pool
No open roles, no application theater. Leave your details, mark the roles that fit, and when one opens you hear first — before any job board.