Careers
We hire slowly,
and only for real work.
Champlin Enterprises is small by design. Nobody is hired to fill a seat here, and there is no queue of tickets waiting for a new pair of hands. What there is, increasingly, is traction: Chamber Culture and HeartBridge OS both have paying customers and both are growing. When one of them pulls hard enough that a second engineer is genuinely the right answer, we would rather already know who to call.
So this page is a pipeline, not a job board. Here is the work, here is the bar, and here is what we would hire for first. If it sounds like you, introduce yourself and we will keep you close.
The shape of it
Two roles, in the order we would need them.
These are sketches written honestly, not requisitions dressed up. The second one matters more than most engineering companies admit: when a product takes off, the thing that breaks first is rarely the architecture. It is the ability to onboard the fiftieth customer as carefully as the first.
Role we would open first
Product Engineer (Full-Stack)
Own features end to end inside our own SaaS products. Laravel and Livewire first, Next.js second, with an AI agent beside you all day.
What you would be doing
- Ship features into Chamber Culture and HeartBridge OS, both of which have paying customers on them today.
- Design the schema, write the migration, build the screen, cover it with Pest, and put it in front of a real chamber director.
- Work with AI agents in the loop constantly, and be the judgment that catches what the agent got quietly wrong.
- Hold the line on WCAG 2.2 AA, because our customers include public bodies with a legal obligation to meet it.
What we would look for
- You have owned something in production, not just contributed to it. You know the difference.
- You can read an unfamiliar codebase and be useful in it inside a day.
- You write plain English as carefully as you write code, because customers read what you write.
- AI-assisted engineering reads as leverage to you, not as cheating.
PHP 8.3 · Laravel · Livewire · Blade · Pest · MySQL · Redis · Next.js · TypeScript (strict)
Role we would open second
Implementation & Support Engineer
The bottleneck when a product takes off is almost never architecture. It is onboarding the fiftieth customer as carefully as the first, and answering well when something breaks.
What you would be doing
- Take a new chamber or nonprofit from signed to genuinely live: data imported, members migrated, staff trained, site launched.
- Own the help desk queue and the error tracker, and know the difference between a customer mistake and our bug.
- Turn every repeated question into a fix, a guide, or a product change, so the same ticket never arrives twice.
- Be the person who notices what the product actually needs, because you are the one watching people use it.
What we would look for
- You are technical enough to read a stack trace and a slow query, without needing to be the one who ships the fix.
- You are unusually patient with non-technical users, and you never make anyone feel stupid.
- You write follow-ups that people actually understand.
- You would rather remove a problem permanently than answer it politely forty times.
SQL · Linux & log reading · Plesk / nginx · Laravel (reading, not always writing) · Real customer conversation
How it actually works here
The bar is high because the team is small.
Six things are true about working here. Read them as filters rather than as perks. If several of them land wrong, that is genuinely useful information for both of us.
Small on purpose
Clients are told there are no account managers and no juniors between them and the code. That promise gets kept, which means every hire has to be someone we would put in front of a customer on day one. It is why the bar is high and the headcount is low.
AI-native, not AI-added
Agents write, review, and test alongside us every single day. That is not a novelty here, it is the baseline. The scarce thing is engineering judgment: knowing what to build, what to refuse, and what a confident-looking diff is quietly getting wrong.
We build the tools we use
Time tracking, error tracking, analytics, the help desk, the client portal, e-signature, the website builder. All of it is ours, all of it is in production, and all of it runs our own company first. You will work on software that we depend on, not just software we sell.
Shipping beats meeting
Work goes out behind a branch, a PR, and a deploy, usually the same day it is written. There is no sprint ceremony to sit through and no committee to route a decision past. The trade is that you are accountable for what you shipped.
Ownership is the unit
Nobody here is handed tickets from a queue built by somebody else. You take a problem, decide what it actually needs, build that, and stay with it once it is live. If a system has your name on it, it is yours at 9pm too.
Faith and fairness
This is a company that quotes Colossians 3:23 in its own footer and means it. Clients are quoted honestly, work gets billed for what it is worth, and people are told the truth even when a comfortable version is available.
The codebase
What you would have your hands in.
There are two halves to the company and they feed each other. One half is client engineering: custom software, mobile apps, and websites engineered like software, backed by a platform we build and operate ourselves. The other half is our own product line, which is where the growth is and where a first hire would most likely land.
Chamber Culture is the flagship: three products in one (anonymous employee-engagement surveys, a member CRM, and white-label member websites) sold to chambers of commerce that were previously paying legacy vendors many times the price. HeartBridge OS is the nonprofit side of the same idea. Both are Laravel, both are live, and both have customers who notice immediately when something is off.
Around them sit the tools we refuse to rent: seventeen products including our own analytics, error tracking, help desk, time tracking, and website builder. Every one of them runs our business before it touches a client.
Stack, honestly
- Products: PHP 8.3, Laravel, Livewire, Blade, Pest, MySQL, Redis.
- Marketing & content: Next.js App Router, React, TypeScript in strict mode, headless WordPress over WPGraphQL.
- Mobile: Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose, shared logic across iOS and Android.
- Infrastructure: our own Linux servers under Plesk and nginx, rsync deploys, plus Vercel where it earns its place.
- AI: every LLM call routes through a gateway we built, with a per-product budget on every key.
- Standards: WCAG 2.2 AA is a requirement, not an aspiration. Several customers are public bodies.
Straight with you
Who this is a bad fit for.
Anyone who needs a big team around them
There is no platform team to hand the hard part to, no QA department, and no designer waiting with a finished mockup. Plenty of people do their best work that way. They should not work here.
Anyone who wants to stay in one layer
A normal week touches a migration, a Livewire component, a CSS bug, a customer email, and a server. If the only interesting part of that list is one item, the job will grind on you.
Anyone waiting for a bigger title
Titles here are close to meaningless and the org chart is one line long. The compensation for that is unusual ownership and unusually fast shipping. If that trade sounds bad, believe yourself.
FAQ
Straight answers
Is there an open role right now?
This page is a standing pipeline rather than a job board, so it does not track a live requisition either way. Hiring here follows the products: Chamber Culture and HeartBridge OS are the two lines pulling hardest, and when one of them pulls hard enough to need a second pair of hands, we start from the people already in this pipeline instead of starting a search from zero. Introducing yourself now costs you one email and puts you at the front of that list.
What would the first hire actually work on?
Real production software with paying customers on it, from week one. Chamber Culture (a Laravel and Livewire platform running surveys, a member CRM, and white-label member sites for chambers of commerce) and HeartBridge OS (nonprofit and donor operations) are the two products most likely to need help first. There is no internal tools team to be parked on and no six-month onboarding. You would ship to production in your first week, because that is how everything here works.
What is the stack?
PHP 8.3 with Laravel, Livewire, Blade and Pest on the product side. Next.js App Router with TypeScript in strict mode, and headless WordPress over WPGraphQL, on the marketing and content side. Kotlin Multiplatform with Compose for mobile. MySQL and Redis for data. Plesk, nginx, and rsync deploys on our own servers, plus Vercel where it earns its place. LLM calls route through an AI gateway we built, with a per-product budget on every key.
How does AI fit into the job?
It is the working method, not a line item. Every engineer here works with AI agents in the loop daily: writing, reviewing, testing, and deploying. That means the value you add is judgment. Reading a diff and knowing what is quietly wrong with it, choosing the schema, catching the missing authorization check, deciding what not to build. If AI-assisted engineering feels like cheating to you, this will be an uncomfortable fit. If it feels like leverage, you will do the best work of your career here.
Remote or on-site?
Remote-first. The company is based in northern Illinois, between Gurnee in Lake County and the Illinois Valley, and there is real value in overlapping US Central hours for the parts of the day that need conversation. Beyond that, where you sit is your business.
Do you take junior engineers?
Honestly, probably not for the first hire. Clients are told that no juniors sit between them and the code, and that promise is kept. What matters more than years is whether you can own something end to end: design it, build it, ship it, and then answer for it when it breaks at 9pm. Some people reach that in three years and some never do. If you can show us work you owned that way, the resume matters much less.
How do I introduce myself?
Email contact@champlinenterprises.com with the subject line "Careers". Send something you built and a short, plain-English note on what was hard about it and what you would do differently now. No cover letter. A GitHub profile, a live URL, or a description of a system you own at work all count equally.
Introduce yourself early.
Send one email with something you built and a short, plain-English note on what was hard about it. No cover letter, no portfolio site required, no form with eleven fields. When a role opens, this is the list we start from.