Tyk careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Tyk has raised about $40.5M in two rounds after bootstrapping for its first five years. The first customers were purchase orders from Viacom and Home Depot, won by sales emails sent before and after work, before the company was even incorporated; a major bank and a major technology vendor followed within about six months of the commercial launch, then Cisco and Capital One. The Series A, £4M (about $5.5M), came in July 2019, led by MMC Ventures with Dan Bailey leading the deal, and paid for the Atlanta office and US expansion. The $35M (£25.4M) Series B closed in September 2021, led by Scottish Equity Partners with MMC Ventures participating; SEP partner Keith Davidson joined the board, and the stated plan was to double headcount from around 100 and open in Germany, Australia and New Zealand. There has been no announced round since, and a September 2026 posting describes Tyk as "a profitable, established company".

Tyk builds an API management platform around an open source gateway written in Go. The gateway handles REST, GraphQL, gRPC, TCP and now MCP and LLM traffic, is licensed under MPL 2.0, and has about 10,800 GitHub stars. The paid layer is the management dashboard, developer portal, analytics and a managed cloud, sold to enterprises that need governance, support and SLAs on top of the free gateway. Gartner has placed Tyk in its Magic Quadrant for API Management for six consecutive years, named it a Leader in 2023, and in May 2026 listed it as the only non-US vendor among the 14 example AI gateway vendors in its report on that market.

Customers include NatWest, Barclays, Capital One, T-Mobile, SoundCloud, Zeiss, Dollar General, Starbucks, Domino's, Societe Generale and Vinci, across more than 100 markets, and Tyk says its software sits in front of the financial transactions of over 100 million people a day. The company was set up in 2015 after the gateway had already gained traction as a side project, and by its tenth anniversary in December 2025 it reported around 150 people in 30 countries, a B Corp certification, and places on the Sunday Times 100 Tech list and Tech Nation's Future Fifty.

Martin Buhr, CEO and co-founder. Wrote the original Tyk gateway in 2014 for a load-testing side business he was running, could not find a gateway that fit, built one, then shut the load-testing service and open sourced the gateway when it took off. Before Tyk he was Head of Technology and Product Development at the karaoke company Lucky Voice (2013 to 2016), a creative technologist at LBi and a project manager at the Soho agency Reading Room, where he met Hirst. Born in Frankfurt and raised in Abu Dhabi, Munich, Bulgaria, Botswana, Edinburgh and Portugal; BSc in Psychology from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MSc in International Management from King's College London. Lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where he moved when his first son was born.

James Hirst, COO and co-founder. Runs the commercial and operational side. Dropped out of law at UCL in his first year, joined one of the UK's earliest consumer ISPs in a junior support role, then co-founded and ran a web design agency for about seven years building sites for music festivals, property companies and pop artists. Spent six years at Reading Room, rising to commercial director, having joined on the same day as Buhr; he quit to go full time on Tyk after its first client was signed. Based in London with three young children, about ten minutes by bike from the office.

Andrew Murray, Chief Customer Officer and co-founder. Joined Tyk as Commercial Director in January 2016, at the commercial launch, and became Chief Customer Officer in January 2021, running customer success and support. Earlier he was European Sales Director at Presteigne Broadcast Hire and a business English trainer. Based in London.

Tyk was remote and flexible from the first day, not as a pandemic adaptation. The two founders live 12 hours apart (Martin Buhr in Auckland, James Hirst in London) and decided at the outset that a company raising young families across time zones would have to work asynchronously, so decisions are made in writing rather than in a room. The company has been audited by Flexa as the world's most flexible SaaS employer and fifth most flexible employer globally (2023), re-verified for 2026-27 with 97% of staff saying they can work flexibly, and 96% of UK staff told Great Place to Work it is a great place to work against a 54% UK norm.

The work is infrastructure that stays up. Tyk's stated aim, set by Buhr at a company retreat, is to be "part of the fabric of the internet, the unglamorous pipes that let everything else run", and the engineering problem now includes governing LLM and MCP traffic for banks and telcos. Employees describe a squad structure with real ownership: Matías Insaurralde, a Senior Go Developer in Paraguay and one of the first hires, has chosen his own hours and location for years, and Agata Witkowska, a Product Owner in Poland, credits the habit of "questioning the status quo" for the Universal Data Graph product.

Career moves inside the company are documented rather than promised. Ain Sahimi went from graphic design to UI design over four years with company-funded part-time UX study, and Chris Taylor finished a business degree while running customer operations and was promoted the year he worked from 15 countries.

The named principle is "radical responsibility", which Buhr defines as "do what you want, just make sure you get it done". There are no timesheets and people are measured on output. Alison Lambert, Head of Employee Success, puts it this way: "No one at Tyk is going to tell you what to do on a daily basis; you are expected to 'crack on', as we say in the UK. The magic comes from you choosing when, how and where you crack on." Hirst is equally clear that this is a filter, not a perk: "not everybody wants radical responsibility", and hiring is aimed at people who do.

Tyk is deliberately not a hustle culture. The team page says growing fast "doesn't mean working 12-hour days and living off Ramen and energy drinks", Buhr's line is that "Tyk is a workplace, not a lifestyle", and at the tenth anniversary he wrote: "Tech culture has often rewarded speed over care. We've always believed the opposite: resilience comes from responsibility." The company invests in the soft side of remote work on purpose: an external partner runs collaboration and remote-management training, everyone gets communication and dispute-resolution training, and staff write a "Library of Me" user manual so colleagues know how they like to work. The self-description is "dreamers, but with a dose of cynicism", who take good engineering seriously "but not ourselves".

Tyk's interview process has four stages and the people team commits to responding to every application. It opens with a people-team conversation about career moves, motivations and skills, then a role-specific interview, usually with the hiring manager, then for some roles a task or presentation at the third stage, and finally a culture interview with someone who works in a completely different part of the company, which Buhr says is there to test empathy and how you will cope with remote work. Tyk does not use psychometric or personality tests in hiring (Hirst calls them "no better than reading tea leaves"); PRINT profiling is used only for team self-reflection after you join.

Several current postings expect regular travel: the Deployed Engineer and Developer Relations roles ask for willingness to travel across the Americas or Europe, and the 2026 marketing and DevRel postings ask for people who already use AI tools daily and can tell "AI-assisted" work from "AI slop". A 2020 post from the UX lead described what she screens for: how you talk about users and problem-solving in part one, and whether the role is right for you and what you want from a manager in part two, followed by a session with the team.