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Talvara

Careers

Small firm. Deep subject. No heroics.

Twenty-four people in Riga, doing one thing carefully. We are not a startup and we do not pretend the work is glamorous — it is infrastructure, and the reward is that it holds.

See the four open roles About the firm

Culture

What it is actually like

The work is a mixture of long-running operational responsibility and short, intense project engagements. Some weeks you will be reading DMARC aggregate reports and writing a note explaining to a marketing director why their new tool is failing alignment. Other weeks you will be running a cutover at two in the morning with eleven hundred mailboxes moving and a rollback plan you wrote yourself.

We are not a place that rewards firefighting. An engineer who quietly prevented six incidents is worth considerably more to us than one who was visible during three, and our review process is built around that view. Incidents get written up without blame attached, and the correction is expected to be structural.

On-call is real and it is compensated properly — a flat allowance for carrying the pager plus time back in lieu for anything that fires overnight. The rota runs one week in six for engineering staff. Nobody is on-call in their first four months, and nobody carries the pager alone.

We are deliberate about growth because we have seen what happens to consultancies that hire ahead of their ability to train. Everyone joining gets a named mentor for the first six months and a deliberately light billable target for the first three.

Terms

The concrete parts

Published salary bands

Every advertised role carries its band. We do not ask for salary expectations and we do not negotiate individually against the band — where you land in it is set by an assessed level, and that level is reviewed annually.

Hybrid, with an actual office

Two days a week in the Riga office for most roles. The office exists because migrations go better when the people running them can turn around and ask a question.

Thirty days' leave

Above the statutory Latvian minimum, plus public holidays. Leave is expected to be taken, and the rota is staffed on the assumption that it will be.

On-call allowance

Flat weekly allowance for carrying the pager, plus time in lieu at 1.5× for anything worked outside hours. One week in six.

Training budget that is used

€2,000 per person per year plus five days, and a standing expectation that you spend it. Conference attendance includes at least one operator-community event annually.

Private health cover

From day one, extendable to partners and dependants at cost. Supplemented pension contributions after the first year.

Open roles

Four openings, as of July 2026

All bands are gross annual EUR. All roles are permanent. We do not use take-home exercises longer than two hours and we pay for anything beyond that.

Messaging Infrastructure Engineer

Engineering Riga · hybrid Permanent €48,000 – €64,000

Operate and improve the mail platforms we run for clients: transport configuration, routing policy, filtering, TLS and the DNS underneath it. You will take your turn on the migration rota and will own the technical relationship for two or three retainer clients.

We are looking for

  • Hands-on experience operating SMTP transport in production — any MTA, we care about the reasoning rather than the vendor.
  • Comfort reading a message trace and a set of headers and forming a hypothesis from them.
  • Working knowledge of DNS beyond "we added a TXT record".
  • Willingness to write things down for people who are not you.
Apply

Deliverability Consultant

Consulting Riga or remote within the EU Permanent €44,000 – €58,000

Run deliverability audits end to end: source discovery, authentication analysis, aggregate report interpretation, reputation review and the remediation plan. You will present findings directly to clients, frequently to a room containing both an infrastructure team and a marketing team who disagree with each other.

We are looking for

  • Genuine fluency in SPF, DKIM and DMARC, including where alignment quietly fails.
  • Experience taking a domain to enforcement without breaking legitimate mail.
  • The patience to explain the same concept three different ways to three different audiences.
  • An instinct for saying "this finding is not worth your money" out loud.
Apply

Information Governance Analyst

Governance Riga · hybrid Permanent €38,000 – €51,000

Work with Corinne on the archiving practice: interviewing clients to establish what they actually need to retain, drafting retention schedules in language a business will follow, and verifying that what was designed is what the system is doing. Some auditor-facing work.

We are looking for

  • Background in records management, information governance or data protection practice.
  • Working understanding of the GDPR's storage limitation and accountability principles as operational constraints, not slogans.
  • The ability to write a policy that a warehouse supervisor and a finance director will both read.
  • Enough technical curiosity to check whether the schedule is really being applied.
Apply

Site Reliability Engineer — Monitoring and Tooling

Engineering Riga · hybrid Permanent €52,000 – €70,000

Own the monitoring estate: synthetic delivery probes, queue and reputation watches, aggregate report ingestion, and the internal tooling the operations rota depends on. A standing part of the role is deleting alerts that have never been actionable.

We are looking for

  • Production experience with observability tooling and time-series data, and opinions about alert design.
  • Solid scripting and service development — most of our internal tooling is Python and Go.
  • Infrastructure-as-code practice, and the discipline to keep the repository the source of truth.
  • Mail experience is welcome but not required. We can teach SMTP; we cannot teach judgement about pages.
Apply

Hiring process

Four steps, three weeks

We commit to a decision within three weeks of the first conversation, and to giving specific feedback to anyone who reaches the second stage.

1 · Introduction, 30 minutes
A conversation with the hiring lead about what you have done and what you want next. Not a screening quiz.
2 · Technical discussion, 90 minutes
Two engineers, a real problem from a past engagement with the client details removed. You may use any reference material you would normally use.
3 · Practical exercise, up to 2 hours
Done in your own time, paid at our day rate pro rata. We will not ask for more than two hours and we will not ask you to build something we could ship.
4 · Meet the team, 60 minutes
Informal, in the Riga office where practical. This is as much for you as for us, and asking hard questions here counts in your favour.

Applications. Send a CV and a short note to careers@noor-mail.com saying which role and what drew you to it. A covering letter of three paragraphs is plenty; we read every one and we do not run automated screening.

Equal opportunity

Talvara recruits on demonstrated ability and potential. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital or family status, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. If you need an adjustment at any stage of the process, tell us when we first speak and we will arrange it without asking for justification.

Applicants must hold, or be eligible for, the right to work in Latvia or in the EU member state from which they would work. We support relocation to Riga for engineering roles, including visa sponsorship where it applies.