Hiring: engineer for Empty Spaces
About
Empty Spaces is a hard sci-fi space sim — 2D, cockpit-only, instruments instead of windows, Newtonian physics, thermodynamics, sensor returns instead of entity-level contacts, locational damage. References: The Expanse, Delta V: Rings of Saturn, Objects in Space, X4, Foundation.
It's built by one person, in evenings and weekends. The codebase is rigorous: domain-driven design, hexagonal architecture, bounded contexts. A simulation that has to hold up at ten thousand objects across ten thousand ticks. Every subsystem is written so a domain expert could review it with a straight face — sensors, thermal, physics, fire control. The bar is high and it doesn't move.
The objective is shipping: Early Access, then Next Fest, then iteration toward 1.0. The codebase is getting too big for one person.
Role
Second engineer on a one-engineer project. You build alongside me, end-to-end — pick up a slice, design it, build it, refactor what it broke, ship. Over time you'll touch every system in the codebase: physics, sensors, thermal, autopilot, fire control, UI. No silos. As the codebase grows, hygiene matters as much as new features — refactoring, bounded-context discipline, and killing duplication are part of the job, not chores.
I'll keep leading architecture and game design for now, and you'll grow into both as you build context. Decisions get made in conversation, not handed down.
Requirements
Must-haves
- Genre fluency. Reads The Expanse, Foundation, Hyperion, Dune, Ghost in the Shell. Has played X4, DCS, Highfleet, Children of a Dead Earth, Nebulous, Objects in Space, or Delta V — and can tell me why one of them is broken.
- Engineer-and-hacker mindset. Curious, opinionated, taste-driven. Doesn't have to be a great coder; has to be able to read the codebase and ship clean diffs without me re-doing them.
- Comfortable with modern AI dev tooling as a power tool — not a threat, not a magic wand. (More on how this project uses it at the bottom.)
- Has built something nobody asked them to build. Game, mod, sim, plugin, weird side project — anything self-driven.
- Comfortable working without a defined ticket queue, sprint planning, or a manager.
- Understanding of Hexagonal Architecture, DDD, and ECS patterns.
Nice-to-haves
- Rust + Bevy experience.
- EET / CET timezone overlap.
Not a fit
- People who want a "real" job at a "real" studio. Go get one — they pay better.
Terms
- Pay. Tentative. Part-time, contract-shaped. Not a Western full-time salary — figures will be discussed on application.
- Hours. Flexible. I care about the diff, not the calendar.
- Location. Anywhere.
- Trajectory. If the game ships and earns, the role grows with it. I'd rather one person grow into this than a rotating contractor seat. No equity at this stage; revenue conversation later if we get there.
Application
Email [email protected] with:
- A short note about who you are and what you've built that nobody asked you to build.
- Links — GitHub, blog, projects, mods, the side thing.
- One paragraph about a sci-fi book, show, or game that shaped how you think.
No CV required. Write plainly.
If the email lands, we do a 30-minute call. If the call goes well, we try a small piece of work together.
I'd rather wait three months for the right person than hire the wrong one in three weeks.
Additional context
About me. Software engineer by trade. Full-stack background, then DevOps, then SRE. Have shipped in Go, Rust, Python, TypeScript. Have managed infrastructure and managed teams. Empty Spaces is the side project.
How development works. I lean on AI tooling heavily — Claude Code, Codex, background agents — to ship at this pace solo. That's the tooling. It's not the work. The work is judgment: good decisions in, the multiplier helps a lot; bad decisions in, you get wrong answers at scale. Often the agent is brilliant. Just as often it's confidently stupid in a way you have to catch before it lands. Sitting at that lever — deciding what to amplify, what to throw out, what to write by hand — is part of daily practice. I cover the tooling subscriptions you need.
Where the game is going. The commercial target is modest by industry standards — enough to validate the concept and fund continued development. If we hit it, the role grows accordingly. If we don't, you'll have spent a year working on a hard sci-fi sim with deep systems.