Nine seats. Ninety days. One version to ship. Each seat owns a named system end to end — not a queue of tickets — and the people who ship it are written into Qawqal's engineering history, permanently, by name.
You would not be joining to polish ten apps that already work. Ten miniapps shipped; whether any of it becomes a daily habit is still unproven, and V2 is the version that has to answer it. Every seat on this page owns part of that answer.
There can be many Qawqal Build Classes. There will only ever be one Founding Class.
Selected builders work directly on Qawqal's next-generation superapp and own a named system end to end — not a queue of tickets.
Nine seats across five disciplines. Each seat owns one named system of V2, end to end.
No cash salary during the V2 class. These are the terms of the Founding Class only. Future Build Classes may use salary, equity, grants, bounties or hybrid structures.
Send a CV and, if you have one, anything you have built. Most strong engineers work under NDA — we do not expect a public portfolio.
Shortlisted applicants meet us privately. The brief, the scope and what we are measuring are shared in that session — never published here.
Confidentiality, IP and equity are signed before your first commit. Everything in writing, before you write a line.
Complete the mission and your name enters Qawqal Hall permanently.
An invitation, a thank-you, or an honest no. Never silence.
The challenge brief is deliberately not published. It is discussed with shortlisted applicants in a private session, so that what we measure stays between us and the people actually competing for a seat.
Exceptional engineers are almost never looking. They are employed, busy, and their strongest work sits in a private repository nobody can see. The only reliable way to reach them is through somebody who already knows how good they are.
If a name came to mind while you read this page, that is the whole point. Tell us who they are and we will do the rest.
Nobody pays you for this and it takes about four minutes. The reason to do it anyway is the same reason you read this far. If a feed a family can scroll at the dinner table is worth existing, it has to be built by the best engineers available — and the best engineers are not going to find us on their own. Somebody has to point at them.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”Elon Musk
We would rather you rule yourself out now than discover it in week three. Both lists are honest.
Yes. The class is designed on the assumption that you have one.
Twenty-five focused hours a week is the floor — three hours a day, or two weekend days and a few evenings. More is welcome and nobody will stop you. But we do not measure the clock: there is one demo a week and it tells us everything a timesheet would. The class runs asynchronously, so there are no standups at awkward hours and no fixed working day.
Read your employment contract before you apply. Many engineering contracts claim work built on your own time, and every seat here assigns IP to Qawqal. If yours is restrictive, tell us early — we would far rather solve it before you write a line than discover it in month three.
Much of the software the world runs on was written by people who had other jobs at the time.No. Seats are earned on evidence of what you can build, and nothing else.
What the work does require is that you can build inside the constraint without fighting it. The Standard is a product specification, not a personal test — but you would be writing the systems that enforce it, and an engineer who privately believes the whole idea is censorship will be unhappy here and will build something worse than they are capable of.
If you find the problem genuinely interesting — a system that can tell a medical image from an immodest one, three traditions sharing one baseline without flattening any of them — that is all the alignment this needs.
Qawqal's engineering history, kept in the open — one chapter per major version. Chapter one is being written now.
Each name is written the day its builder's first milestone ships — in ink, not pencil. Chapter two opens only when a new mission exists, with its own seats and its own terms.
Closed source removes public commit history. Qawqal replaces it with a permanent, company-verified record of what you owned and what you shipped.
The Screen — contextual moderation. The system that tells a medical image from an immodest one.
v2.0 – v2.3 · classification pipeline, appeal routing, evaluation harness
“The Filter thinks because Amina taught it to.” — Sheldon, co-founder
Every record lives at a permanent canonical URL — share it anywhere and it unfurls with the builder's name. Photograph, biography and links are published only with the builder's approval. Links above are illustrative; this is not a current Qawqal contributor.
Every entry lives at its own permanent address — link to it from anywhere →
A verified badge can link back from a personal site, portfolio or résumé to the builder's permanent Qawqal record.
Builders may publish sanitized technical notes that demonstrate the thinking without exposing proprietary implementation.
Each completed class can culminate in a product demo where builders present their systems to founders, community, investors and future applicants.
V2 carries its builders the way a film carries its crew — three taps from the home screen, in every release, on every phone Qawqal reaches.
QAW-V2-006 · Verified
We cannot promise Qawqal will reach billions. We can promise that if it does, the people who built its early generations are not erased from the story.
Think of it as a CV that compounds with the product.
Not everyone converts — the core stays small on purpose — but the shortlist is the nine. Conversion depends on need, funding and what you actually shipped. The third is the one you control, and it is the one we watch for ninety days.
Your $4,500 award is written into the agreement and paid when that round closes. The salaried roles it funds are the ones this class is shortlisted for.
A clean feed keeps serving people for as long as it runs. Every tradition Qawqal is built for has a name for work like that — sadaqah jariyah, treasure stored where moth and rust do not destroy, ma'asim tovim. Whatever you call it, ninety days of building can outlast the ninety days.
That part is between you and God. The equity, the bonus and the paid path are between you and us — and they are in writing.
Religious affiliation is not required to earn a seat. Seats are earned on evidence of what you can build.
V2 reflects the risk and the resources of Qawqal's current stage. Future classes may use salary, equity, grants, bounties or hybrid compensation. What stays constant:
Small teams, hard missions, real ownership and permanent recognition.