Vibe Coder / AI-Leveraged Developer

About Three Doors

Three Doors is a pre-launch immersive entertainment company. We're building a 90-minute live experience for teams of 3–6 where every player walks out with a behavioural profile derived from how they actually moved through pressure — not from a questionnaire. Two audiences, one product: consumer tickets for friends, couples and groups; corporate team-development packages on weekdays.

The founder is Tom Ball, who built DeskLodge (48,000 sq ft, £4m turnover, Sunday Times Top 10 Best Places to Work 2023, B-Corp) and has played 121 escape rooms in service of this. Tom himself codes the firmware (ESP32 / BLE / Bluetooth Classic / Opus audio).

We are pre-seed. Small team, AI-leveraged: a couple of full-time hires (Game Master, Operations Manager) plus a small consultant pool. This is the software-build seat in that pool — for the tools layer, distinct from firmware (which Tom owns).

The role

You ship working software fast, in close partnership with Tom, using agentic AI tooling end-to-end. The role is for the application layer: the audio console that drives show operations, the WhatsApp engine that holds our waitlist conversation (the Pathfinder), the public website, the internal Cloudflare-Access-gated tools, and whatever else the business needs next.

You are not building infrastructure for a hypothetical scale; you are building real tools for a real team that needs them next month.

Deliverables

The initial paid project is 20 days. Enough to ship one significant piece of work — likely the audio console, OR a meaningful upgrade to the WhatsApp engine, OR a website + internal-tools sprint — but not all of them. We'd agree which at engagement start. The other workstreams sit on the follow-on roadmap.

The full scope this role might cover over time, in roughly priority order:

• Audio console — the show-runner tool that drives Pathfinder voiceover playback, cueing, and team-state monitoring during a live experience. Likely a web app talking to our on-site server over the LAN
• WhatsApp engine ("Pathfinder") — a Node/Express service integrating the Meta WhatsApp Cloud API + Anthropic + ElevenLabs. Existing codebase needs feature work and hardening, not green-field
• Public website — threedoors-web on Cloudflare Pages. Static today, will grow. Careers pages, brand pages, blog, eventually booking
• Internal tools — small Cloudflare-Access-gated apps (unit-economics, competitor teardowns, more to come)
• Glue and automation — Tally → Notion, and the small integrations that compound across the team

Who you are

• You ship things. We can find your work — repos, deployed apps, anything we can look at and say "right, that's the standard"
• AI-native by practice, not by claim. You use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar agentic dev tools daily and have opinions about where they break and where they shine
• Comfortable across the full stack — JS/TS, Node, a Python script when needed, HTML/CSS that doesn't embarrass you, basic Linux server competence
• Pragmatic. The first version of every tool is rough. You make rough work and improve the parts that matter
• You can read someone else's code without rewriting everything
• Comfortable working closely with a founder who reads code and pushes back

Bonus

• ESP32 / embedded experience (you won't own firmware, but you'll touch the seams between tools and devices)
• WebSocket / real-time experience (the audio console is real-time)
• Cloudflare Workers / Pages / Access ecosystem experience
• Voice/audio app experience (ElevenLabs, Whisper, Opus streaming, BLE audio)
• WhatsApp Cloud API / Meta integrations experience

How we work

• AI-leveraged. Tom uses Claude Code daily and expects you do too. If you don't, this isn't the role
• Pre-venue. Tools are being built against a product still being built. Comfort with churn is essential
• Cockroach, not unicorn. We optimise for surviving long enough to learn, not for looking impressive
• Bias to operating discipline over startup-theatre. Tom's background is operational real estate, not VC-circuit

Terms

Initial scope, with view to more. This is an initial paid project — 20 days, focused on shipping one piece of real software. If it works, there's a clear runway of follow-on work: the other workstreams above, plus whatever else surfaces. Cadence beyond the first 20 days could be steady part-time, project-by-project, or eventually full-time as the business funds and scales. Several of the consultant briefs in this pool exist because the right initial engagement could grow into something bigger.

What we're imagining: 20 days total, drawn down over roughly 6–10 weeks. Day rate and fee structure discussed directly.

What we'd like to see: your proposal. Fixed-scope per workstream, milestone-based, weekend availability, a different cadence — show us how you'd structure it.

• Mostly remote with periodic days at Henley HQ (Unit 1 Stuart's Lane, RG9 1RY) for working sessions
• IP terms. Your fee covers IP assignment on delivered code, including prompts, agent configs, and any AI-tool scaffolding you build for our work. You retain general methodology and any tooling you use across other clients
• Code is the standard product, but you'll often pair with Tom on architecture decisions — and you should expect to push back when something is wrong

How to apply

Send us, in your own words: (1) two repo or deployed-app links plus one sentence on what you'd change about each now, (2) the AI dev tools you use day-to-day and how you decide between them, (3) one project you shipped that the user actually used (and what surprised you about how they used it), (4) one question you'd want to ask Tom before deciding.

CV optional. Working code mandatory.

Three Doors Experience Ltd is an equal-opportunity employer. We hire on judgement, behaviour under pressure, and whether you'll make the team better — not on credentials.