Om oss · About
A studio that tries
to become unnecessary.
The SaaS arm of Chenist Cyber Security — we build infrastructure out of free software, host it in Europe, and hand it over in a repository you own.
- Founded
- 2017 · Göteborg
- Offices
- Two, four from 2027
- People
- Seven
- At a time
- Three or four engagements
Chenborg is the SaaS arm of Chen.ist — Chenist Cyber Security. Where the parent company does security work, Chenborg does the part that comes after the audit: actually building and running the systems, out of software you are allowed to read.
We started in Göteborg in 2017, and opened an engineering office in Craiova, Romania, in 2019. Both were founded by people who had spent a decade watching the same thing happen: a company buys a platform, the platform becomes the company's architecture, and five years later nobody can leave without a rewrite.
We build the other kind of system. Everything we deliver is open source, so there is no licence that can be revoked and no roadmap that can be taken away. Everything runs on European infrastructure, so the jurisdiction question has a short answer. And everything is committed to a repository you own, so the day you decide to run it yourself is a Friday afternoon rather than a project.
Ärligt talat · Honestly
What we are good at,
and what we are not.
The second list is the more useful one. It is also the reason our proposals are shorter than they could be.
Good at
Static sites that do not break. Declarative servers that can be rebuilt from a file. Firewalls and private networks that a new engineer can read. Project tracking that belongs to you. Local language models that keep your source code on your own hardware. Laptops that arrive running Unix with every function key working. And the events that make a company comfortable building in the open.
We are a studio, not an agency. There are seven of us across the two offices, we take three or four engagements at a time, and the person who scopes your work is the person who does it. When an engagement needs a security review rather than an architecture one, it goes to Chen.ist and we say so.
Not good at
Anything that has to be finished by Friday because somebody promised it on Monday. Design work without an engineering problem underneath. Vendor relationships where we are expected to defend a product we did not choose. Growth-hacking, funnels, and the parts of the internet that require a cookie banner.
We also do not resell hosting. You hold the account and the invoice at your provider; we hold an operator credential you can revoke in thirty seconds. It is a smaller business for us and a better arrangement for you.
Eight points · four cardinal, four between
Namnet och stjärnan · The name and the star
A fortified place, and the point you steer by.
Borg is Swedish for a fortified place — Vaxholm, Kalmar, Gripsholm. Somewhere you keep what matters, built to outlast the people who built it.
The mark is the North Star. Polaris is the one point in the sky that does not move, which is why every navigator in the northern hemisphere has taken their bearing from it for as long as there has been sailing. It is a reasonable thing for an infrastructure company to put on its door: the fixed point you steer by when everything else is turning.
It is drawn in yellow and deep blue — complementary colours, and by happy accident the Swedish ones. Eight points: four long ones for the cardinal bearings and four shorter between them, the way a compass rose is drawn.
Since
2015
Hackathons · Every year
At least one public hackathon a year, without missing one.
We have delivered at least one public hackathon every year since 2015. The first was at Linköping Science Park, two years before Chenborg existed as a company — the events came first, and the company grew out of the people who kept turning up to run them.
We have not missed a year since, which is the only credential that matters here: running one event is logistics, running one every year for a decade means having already made the mistakes that count. It is also the cheapest way we know to get an organisation genuinely comfortable publishing work in the open, which is usually the actual blocker rather than any technical one.
15:00 CET · Fika
Half an hour, both offices, no agenda.
Every weekday at 15:00 CET both offices stop for half an hour. Not a stand-up, not a retro, not a meeting with coffee in it — coffee, something sweet, and whatever the conversation turns out to be.
It is the one appointment we do not move for a client, and it is on this page for a practical reason rather than a charming one. Almost every expensive mistake we have made was known to somebody on the team a fortnight before it surfaced, and it surfaced in a meeting where saying so was awkward. Half an hour with no agenda is where that gets said instead.
It is also why the Craiova office exists on the same clock as Göteborg rather than a convenient offshore one. Two offices only work if they can sit down at the same time.
So: no trackers, no cookies, no third-party scripts. Just fika.
Jobb · Careers
We hire rarely,
and we hire slowly.
Seven people across two offices is a deliberate size rather than a stage we are trying to grow out of. We add someone when the work is genuinely there, which works out at about once a year.
- Team
- Seven, two offices
- Based
- Göteborg or Craiova
- We answer
- Within a week
- Working languages
- English, Swedish, Romanian
What we look for
Someone who can read a system they did not build. Most of this job is arriving at a machine with fifteen years of history on it and working out what is actually load-bearing before touching anything.
Writing matters more than people expect. Runbooks, proposals and the paragraph that explains to a finance director why the migration is worth it are a real share of the week. If you would rather not write, you would not enjoy it here.
And a willingness to say “I do not know” in front of a client. We sell honest opinions; that only works if people are comfortable giving one.
What to send
A few paragraphs is plenty. What you run today, something you have taken apart and put back together, and what you would want to work on here. Links to anything public are worth more than a list of tools.
We do not run a permanent advertisement, because a studio of seven adds someone about once a year and pretending otherwise wastes everybody's afternoon. Write anyway — good letters keep, and we come back to them when the work arrives.
If you are finishing a degree, or moving into this from another kind of engineering, say so plainly. It is not a disqualifier and we would rather know.
- 1 Brevet The letter Write to hej@chenborg.com and tell us what you have run and what broke. No form, no portal, no account to create. A CV is welcome but it is the second thing we read.
- 2 Samtalet The conversation About forty minutes with the people you would actually work beside, not a recruiter. Bring something you have built or broken and want to talk about.
- 3 Dagen A paid day One day on a real problem from our own backlog, paid at our day rate, rather than a puzzle invented for the occasion. You keep the work and the money whichever way it goes.
- 4 Beskedet The answer Inside a week, with the reasoning, either way. We have been on the other side of the silence and did not care for it.
Write to us We read everything that arrives and answer within a week. Applications keep — two of the current seven wrote to us before there was anything to apply for.
Var vi finns · Where we are
Two offices in two countries.
Four from 2027.
The machines are in Romania, Sweden or Germany — whichever the client chooses. We work across the Nordics, the Baltics, German-speaking Europe and Romania, remotely by default and on site when a migration deserves a room with a whiteboard in it.
Since 2017
Göteborg
Sweden
Head office
57°42′N 11°58′E
Since 2019
Craiova
Romania
Engineering
44°19′N 23°48′E
Soon
Stockholm
Sweden
Opening
59°20′N 18°04′E
Soon
Bucharest
Romania
Opening
44°26′N 26°06′E
Two offices in two countries — four from 2027 — is also part of the argument we make to clients. Everything we build has to survive one of them being asleep.