Work with us

Three kinds of work, and the people we’d like to do them with.

We aren’t actively hiring. But in each of these areas we’d take someone on, or start a collaboration on a single project, if the fit was right. One more person changes what we can take on.

Where: Anywhere, except the West Cornwall work, which is in person.
How: The remote work is about 98% async: we write things down, and call when talking is quicker. More on how we work
Pay: In most currencies. We talk numbers once the shape of what we’d do together is clear.
Shape: A role, a contract, or a collaboration on a single project. Whichever fits.

Research · Remote, async

Model training and tuning

For clients with private corpora who want a model that knows their field and runs where their data is allowed to go: continued pretraining and post-training on current open-weight models, and the evaluations that show whether it worked. Sometimes the honest answer is that retrieval would do, and we say so.

It’s research-led: we want to know why a run helped, not just that a number went up. Compute is mostly rented, around the B200 class, and occasionally bought, depending on the client’s budget and needs. You’d lead the training work; Dave scopes it with clients.

You’ve probably

adapted open-weight models (continued pretraining, SFT, preference tuning, RL, distillation) and can say what each stage changed;
built evaluations from real tasks, and checked any LLM judge against people’s grades;
worked under strict rules about where data could go, and kept to them.

Send us a model card, repo, paper or write-up of something you trained, how you knew it had worked, and what you’d do differently. Private work described without the secrets is fine.

Practice · In person Exploring

AI for West Cornwall businesses

We’re thinking about a local practice, helping businesses around West Cornwall use AI well. A week might be a morning at a boatyard or a lettings agency, finding where the paperwork piles up; a couple of days building a small tool for it; and an afternoon showing the team how to use it, then going back a fortnight later to see what stuck.

You’d be working alongside Dave for most of this, at least for the first year. In time, the local business could be yours to run, so we’d build it from the start not to depend on him. Dave’s exploring this idea: it will only go forward if he finds the right local partner, or his kids decide smallholding beats sailing and Penzance becomes home for good.

You’ve probably

built AI workflows for yourself or others, because you wanted to, and can show them;
explained something technical to people who didn’t ask to learn it, and enjoyed it;
sold something in person, or worked in customer service.

You don’t need years of experience or a degree in it. You will need to live within reach of Penzance, or be ready to, and have the right to work in the UK.

Send us something you’ve built with AI, and a few lines on who it helped. If you run a business around here and would use this, tell us that too.

Engineering · Remote, async

Data engineering for AI

Most AI work succeeds or fails before a model is involved. We’d like someone who loves that pre-work: getting messy, private data into shape for retrieval, training and agents, and showing what each decision did to the result.

You’ve probably

built ingestion for documents that fought back: scans, tables, email archives;
made the calls on chunking, deduplication and personal data, and kept provenance, versions and access rights attached from source to index;
made evaluation sets from real data, kept them out of the training data, and actually looked at the data.

Send us a pipeline, repo or write-up (private work described without the secrets is fine), and what you’d check first in a new client’s data.

Getting in touch

No form. Just an email.

What to send

Which of the three, or what else you think fits.
A few truthful lines about you.
Links to something you’ve made, or a description if it’s private. Only send what you’re free to share.
Where you’re based.

You can attach a CV or link to a public profile (LinkedIn, GitHub, your own site) if you like.

Write to dave@tha.la

We read every note and answer each one, even if only to say not now.

If we ask you to do any trial work, we pay for it.

We keep your note and anything you send for up to 12 months from your last message, in case work that suits you comes up, then delete it. Ask and we’ll delete it sooner. See Privacy.

If a call would suit you better than an email, say so.

If this sounds like someone you know, please pass it on.

Last reviewed October 2026