Architect - all levels

Open call: Architects, junior to senior. Dublin.

Ruumi Studio is an architecture and interior design practice with studios in Dublin and Manchester, and a presence in London.

We began in early 2026 as a spin-out from an international real estate firm, and we brought our live portfolio and our design IP with us. That detail matters more than it sounds. It means we skipped the year most new practices spend chasing work. We opened with a full order book and it has stayed full. In our first year we have delivered over 250,000 sq ft and been nominated for four awards so far this year.

Around half our work is commercial fit-out. A quarter is heritage and deep retrofit. The balance is spread across aviation, industrial and workplace. Most of it involves buildings that already exist and have firm opinions about what you are allowed to do to them.

There are six of us. We want to grow by two or three. That is why this is an open call at junior, middleweight and senior level rather than a single vacancy.

Lad Lane

We move into a new studio on Lad Lane in September. Two floors of a self-contained mews, with a ground-floor showroom for Indi, our furniture dealership.

It is the largest investment we have made, and we designed it ourselves. That seemed like the minimum standard for a practice that spends its days telling other organisations how their workplace should perform. It is not, on the evidence of visiting our competitors, an industry norm.

The nine-day fortnight

Every second Friday off, from your first day. Not a pilot, not something you earn after probation.

The reasoning is unromantic. Roughly three quarters of architects report burnout at some point and half of those consider leaving the profession, with the worst of it landing right at the point people become good at this job. We would rather not lose anyone that way and then congratulate ourselves on the overtime.

It also means the salaries below buy ninety per cent of the time a five-day practice would ask of you. Worth doing the arithmetic before you compare offers.

What we ask for

Two things, and neither is negotiable.

Revit proficiency. Not “familiar with”. You can model, detail and coordinate without somebody standing behind you.

An inquisitive mind. The sort of person who disappears down a rabbit hole on a Friday afternoon and comes back knowing how something works.

You will also need to be eligible for RIAI registration, or in the final stages of Part 3. We will support you through the rest of it if you are mid-process.

That is the list. We will teach the rest, and we mean it literally rather than as a pleasantry. It is the basis on which we are hiring.

What helps

• Commercial office, deep retrofit or fit-out experience. It is the bulk of what we do.

• You are already augmenting your design or documentation workflow with AI. We are building the practice around this rather than waiting to see how it settles.

• Working knowledge of BC(A)R. We can teach it, but a head start is useful.

• The ability to hold both ends: to obsess over a detail section as much as a concept sketch. If you think “creative” and “technical” are opposing personality types, we are probably not the right fit.

Pay

• Junior: €48,000 to €56,000

• Middleweight: €56,000 to €70,000

• Senior / Associate: €70,000 to €90,000

Bands are set by capability, not by years served. What matters is what you can run unsupervised, what you can be trusted with in front of a client, and what you can teach the person next to you. Where you land in a band follows from that rather than from how comfortable you are asking. Some people find that conversation easy and some find it excruciating, and we would rather pay for the work than for the confidence.

What you get

• The nine-day fortnight, as above.

• Real responsibility on live projects, early. Not three years working through somebody else’s redlines.

• Direct access to the directors. Six people is small enough that decisions happen in conversations rather than committees.

• A discretionary annual bonus. At six people, the connection between how well a project is run and how well the year goes is short enough to see. That is not true in most places you have worked.

• At senior and associate level, a defined leadership pathway that ends in a position of real responsibility in the practice. We are six people who intend to be considerably more than six. The people who help build that should have something to show for it, and we would rather be explicit about it now than vague about it later.

• We submit our B Corp application in Q1 2027, once we have a full year of trading behind us. We are not certified yet, but are comitted to the process.

Practical

Lad Lane, Dublin 2. Hybrid, minimum three days a week in the studio. You would report directly to one of the directors.

Before you apply

At a practice this size you can find out exactly who you would be working with before you send anything. That is harder to do with a hundred-person studio, where you meet whoever is free on the day.

One of our co-founders was on Architecture Social recently, talking about how Ruumi is run, how we build around AI and what we actually look for when hiring. It was not recorded with recruitment in mind, which is rather the point. If you only listen to one part, start at 37:01.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7o1RoOQ1gXHaBPZi5Jftdd

There is an earlier conversation on The Business of Architecture from March 2026, recorded before Ruumi, on running a design practice inside a large corporate. Useful background on where we came from rather than where we are.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2LvZFAkgY3WfmPCD8qkR2j

To apply

CV and portfolio to admin@ruumi.studio. PDF, under 10MB, we are begging you.

Include a short paragraph on a detail, a drawing or a decision from a project you worked on that you would do differently now, and why. We read that before the covering letter.