Om oss · About
A studio that tries
to become unnecessary.
The SaaS arm of Chenist Cyber Security. We build infrastructure out of free software, host it in Europe and hand it over in a repository you own.
- Founded
- 2017 · Göteborg
- Offices
- Two, four from 2027
- People
- Seven
- At a time
- Three or four engagements
Chenborg is the SaaS arm of Chen.ist (Chenist Cyber Security, reg. no. 41309500). The parent company does security work. Chenborg does what comes after the audit: building and running the systems, using software you are allowed to read.
We started in Göteborg in 2017, and opened an engineering office in Craiova, Romania, in 2019. Both were founded by people who had spent a decade watching the same thing happen: a company buys a platform, the platform becomes the company's architecture, and five years later nobody can leave without a rewrite.
We build the other kind of system. Everything we deliver is open source, so there is no licence that can be revoked and no roadmap that can be taken away. It runs on European infrastructure, which gives the jurisdiction question a short answer. All of it is committed to a repository you own, and if you decide to run it yourself, the handover takes a Friday afternoon rather than a project.
Nackdelar · The downsides
What we are good at,
and what we are not.
The second list is the more useful one, and it is why our proposals are shorter than they could be.
Good at
Static sites that do not break. Declarative servers that can be rebuilt from a file. Firewalls and private networks that a new engineer can read. Project tracking that belongs to you. Local language models that keep your source code on your own hardware. Laptops that arrive running Unix with every function key working. And the events that make a company comfortable building in the open.
We are a small studio. There are seven of us across the two offices, we take three or four engagements at a time, and the person who scopes your work is the person who does it. When an engagement needs a security review rather than an architecture one, we tell you and it goes to Chen.ist.
Not good at
Anything that has to be finished by Friday because somebody promised it on Monday. Design work without an engineering problem underneath. Vendor relationships where we are expected to defend a product we did not choose. Growth-hacking, funnels, and the parts of the internet that require a cookie banner.
We also do not resell hosting. You hold the account and the invoice at your provider; we hold an operator credential you can revoke in thirty seconds. That keeps our business smaller, and it suits you better.
Eight points · four cardinal, four between
Namnet och stjärnan · The name and the star
A fortified place, and the point you steer by.
Borg is Swedish for a fortified place, such as Vaxholm, Kalmar or Gripsholm: somewhere you keep what matters, built to outlast the people who built it.
The mark is the North Star. Polaris is the one point in the sky that does not move, and navigators in the northern hemisphere have taken their bearing from it for as long as there has been sailing. It seemed a reasonable thing for an infrastructure company to put on its door, as a fixed point to steer by when everything else is turning.
It is drawn in yellow and deep blue, which are complementary colours and, by happy accident, the Swedish ones. It has eight points: four long ones for the cardinal bearings and four shorter ones between them, as on a compass rose.
Since
2015
Hackathons · Every year
At least one public hackathon a year, without missing one.
We have delivered at least one public hackathon every year since 2015. The first was at Linköping Science Park, two years before Chenborg existed as a company. The events came first, and the company grew out of the people who kept turning up to run them.
We have not missed a year since. Running one event is logistics; running one every year for a decade means we have already made the mistakes that count. It is also the cheapest way we know to get an organisation comfortable publishing work in the open, which is usually a bigger blocker than anything technical.
15:00 CET · Fika
Half an hour, both offices, no agenda.
Every weekday at 15:00 CET both offices stop for half an hour for coffee, something sweet and whatever the conversation turns out to be. Nobody runs it as a stand-up or a retro.
It is the one appointment we do not move for a client, and it is on this page for a practical reason. Almost every expensive mistake we have made was known to somebody on the team a fortnight before it surfaced, and it surfaced in a meeting where saying so was awkward. Half an hour with no agenda gives people somewhere to say it earlier.
It is also why the Craiova office keeps the same clock as Göteborg rather than a convenient offshore one: two offices only work if they can sit down at the same time.
No trackers, no cookies, no third-party scripts. Just fika.
Jobb · Careers
We hire rarely,
and we hire slowly.
Seven people across two offices is a size we chose, and we are not trying to grow out of it. We add someone when there is enough work to justify it, which comes to about once a year.
- Team
- Seven, two offices
- Based
- Göteborg or Craiova
- We answer
- Within a week
- Working languages
- English, Swedish, Romanian
What we look for
Someone who can read a system they did not build. Most of this job is arriving at a machine with fifteen years of history on it and working out what is load-bearing before touching anything.
Writing matters more than people expect. Runbooks, proposals and the paragraph that explains to a finance director why the migration is worth it are a real share of the week. If you would rather not write, you would not enjoy it here.
We also need people willing to say “I do not know” in front of a client. Clients pay us for straight opinions, and that only works if people are comfortable giving one.
What to send
A few paragraphs is plenty. What you run today, something you have taken apart and put back together, and what you would want to work on here. Links to anything public are worth more than a list of tools.
We do not run a permanent advertisement, because a studio of seven adds someone about once a year and pretending otherwise wastes everybody's afternoon. Write anyway. Good letters keep, and we come back to them when the work arrives.
If you are finishing a degree, or moving into this from another kind of engineering, say so. It is not a disqualifier and we would rather know.
- 1 Brevet The letter Write to office@chenborg.com and tell us what you have run and what broke. No form, no portal, no account to create. A CV is welcome but it is the second thing we read.
- 2 Samtalet The conversation About forty minutes with the people you would work beside; there is no recruiter. Bring something you have built or broken and want to talk about.
- 3 Dagen A paid day One day on a real problem from our own backlog, paid at our day rate. We do not set puzzles invented for the occasion. You keep the work and the money whichever way it goes.
- 4 Beskedet The answer Inside a week, with the reasoning, either way. We have been on the other side of that silence ourselves and did not care for it.
Write to us We read everything that arrives and answer within a week. Applications keep: two of the current seven wrote to us before there was anything to apply for.
Var vi finns · Where we are
Two offices in two countries.
Four from 2027.
The machines are in Romania, Sweden or Germany, whichever the client chooses. We work across the Nordics, the Baltics, German-speaking Europe and Romania, remotely by default and on site when a migration deserves a room with a whiteboard in it.
Since 2017
Göteborg
Sweden
Head office
57°42′N 11°58′E
Since 2019
Craiova
Romania
Engineering
44°19′N 23°48′E
Soon
Stockholm
Sweden
Opening
59°20′N 18°04′E
Soon
Bucharest
Romania
Opening
44°26′N 26°06′E
Having two offices in two countries (four from 2027) is also part of the argument we make to clients, because everything we build has to survive one of them being asleep.