Work with us

If you have any questions, contact us
join@darkmatterlabs.org

We’re a multi-disciplinary and distributed team based around the globe. What’s important to us is using the context and local conditions of projects to grow our knowledge and use it to iterate our knowledge and practice across all of our work. We pride ourselves on learning, experimentation and intuition, and look to provide members of the team ways in which they can grow their own knowledge and practice. We view projects, processes and how we work as an evolving design that you would be part of shaping.

Here’s a little on how we currently organise:

• We all work remotely, with flexible working hours around schedules (most people do main hours between 9-6).
• We work as dynamic hierarchies. We don’t organise through fixed line managers or fixed JDs but through teams and circles - we have different areas of expertise and focus and we pick up and shed roles as required. This requires good communication, high emotional intelligence and levels of trust.
• We run on a series of digital tools that we use daily to coordinate, learn and govern together (Slack, Notion, Google Worklace, Miro among them)
• We’re organised in multidisciplinary working groups that span mission, deep codes, projects, orgdev and operations. Each working group is flexible and spans a series of projects to form a portfolio work.
• This setup allows us to be a platform organisation and to nurture and grow ideas the team are passionate about and believe are needed, and align advance our core values and mission.
• In time and experience, we invite everyone to grow our portfolio of work as a way to grow our collective skills, knowledge, and ideas – this is an invitation, not an obligation.

We highly value lived experience as a form of expertise and we consider having a broad and diverse range of lived experience within the team, as being critical for us to be able to do our best possible work together and to create a range of spaces and accommodate a broad spectrum of life experience into our planetary team.

Dark Matter Labs continues to educate, question and critically review ourselves on how we can improve. We recognise and celebrate the true value of a safe and accepting working environment that - among other things - a diverse team with distributed power can unlock, and work to address our underlying biases and power structures that can prevent that from materialising.

This type of work requires the willingness to work on yourself, your relationships with power, the assumptions and experiences that influence how you think, and more.*

*We recognise that our work deals with some existential questions and content that can be triggering. We have a team focused on the team’s mental health and personal development and we continue to incrementally build the necessary psychological infrastructures for this work.

We know that there is more that we can do to make this recruitment more accessible, particularly if you have experienced exclusion, disadvantage or discrimination, or if you have particular accessibility needs. We would be happy to provide any further support that you may require - please get in touch so that we can work together to provide that.

Our approach to pay is not based on favoring one skill over another or rewarding hierarchical power dynamics. Instead, we recognize that everyone possesses unique and exceptional skills, and we remove the process of valuing and comparing them. This allows us to focus on unleashing those skills in diverse ways based on the specific context. It gives us the freedom to determine, assign, and assess roles based on what is most suitable for each situation, rather than being constrained by predefined roles tied to compensation.

As a result, our pay is designed not to reward people for tasks done, but to cover living costs so that we are freed to create what we believe is needed in the world.Our current base pay for everyone on the team is:

Formula = (Years experience + 23 (+ 8.82 for freelancers)) *1000 = gross pro rata pay in GBP.

*Years experience includes all experience after school completion age (18) - inc work, education, unpaid work (care, volunteering, etc).

We recognise that no formula that tries to do this can fully account for the unique contexts of every person. Therefore we also have a rebalancing process in place to accommodate individual circumstances.

We have recently put in place a range of benefits support across the team, including coaching, learning funds, sabbatical and secondment support, learning funds, workspace funds and more. These were set collectively by the team and vary according to statutory provisions in different geographies - we’ll be happy to confirm the relevant approach for your geography and contract type.

Our holiday policy is a minimum of 28 days/year pro-rata, but we encourage you to take all of the time that you need to properly rest.

Dark Matter Labs is an equal opportunities employer, and we continue to educate ourselves on how we can improve. Humans from all nationality, race, sex, religion, disability, sexual orientation and identity are welcome. We recognise and celebrate the true value of a safe and accepting working environment that only a diverse team can unlock, and work to address our underlying biases that can prevent that from materialising. Our projects and partners are spread across the globe and we aim to reflect the same diversity on multiple levels in our team and with the partners we work with.