Working at Denim & Steel

At Denim & Steel, design and engineering are parts of the same process. It’s not about having both skill sets; it’s about thinking with both mindsets.

Working Here

Denim & Steel is a tightly-knit team that shares involvement and responsibility throughout the entire project lifecycle. Developers are in the design process, designers are in with development work, and everyone owns QA. Each team member has a voice in how projects unfold.

We care about high quality code as much as we care about design, accessibility, and our responsibility for the individual and social impact of what we put into the world.

We believe that diversity and inclusion among all teammates is critical to our success, and welcome people regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and national origin.

Current Openings

We don’t have any current openings. New openings are announced in our newsletter, so subscribe to hear when that happens.

Say hello@denimandsteel.com

About This Land

Even work that happens in the nowhere/everywhere of the Internet comes from a physical place. The place where we work and live is the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

We live and work on stolen land.

There are many ways to word a land acknowledgement. Why did we choose these words, exactly?

Once arresting, land acknowledgements are now familiar in many public spaces and gatherings. The repetition works, but the paradox is that it can dull the poignancy of these important statements. Online we often see land acknowledgements shuffled into footers and About pages, more of a checkbox than a felt statement.

Stolen land isn’t a phrase we came up with, and it is strong wording. We invoke it here to keep our own awareness of Reconciliation sharp. In our design work we take conscious steps to ensure land acknowledgements are more than easily overlooked boilerplate. These are small steps in a long process; they’re made to remind us and others of the work ahead.

What makes this place special to us

The area now called Metro Vancouver is a study of dramatic contrasts: sea level breaks to the sharp rise of mountains, wealth and hardship abut and overlap, and a gentle climate belies a fitfully slumbering tectonic monster.

Everywhere we look here we find life and change at different scales. Living here means being alert to confluences and conflicts, and being careful not to fall into anxiety or whatever-ism. It’s a place that challenges and inspires, and makes evident the many types of edges that we live along. That awareness is infused in our way of working, and makes our work something that couldn’t be the same were it from anywhere else.

To us, this is an inspiring place in many ways. But those inspirations come with a responsibility to recognize the historical wrongs that led to our presence here.