Highlighted company: Hurdle

When Hurdle put an engineering role on cord, Rob Thompson writes it himself. He co-founded the company, he is its CTO, and he is the person who replies when you message about it. The salary goes on the front of the ad rather than being held back for a call.

His last one went up two minutes after they reopened their cord account. That is not a scheduling coincidence. It is how a company of 50 hires when the person who needs the engineer is the person doing the hiring.

Who Hurdle are

Hurdle is the commercial brand of Chronomics Ltd, the side of the business that sells to other companies. Chronomics was founded in 2017 by a group of scientists and engineers including Tom Stubbs, now CEO, Dr Daniel Elías Martín Herranz, their Chief Science Officer, Toby Call, and Rob Thompson.

What they build is infrastructure for diagnostics. Launching a medical test normally means assembling labs, analysers, assays, regulatory approval, logistics and fulfilment, separately, over months. Hurdle abstracts all of it behind one API. What used to take years and millions of dollars for a single test, they can now do in days: a new bioinformatics pipeline written in the morning and running as a live diagnostic service by the evening.

They have processed over 3 million tests since 2017. During the pandemic they built the first COVID PCR test that worked from saliva and carried a CE mark, and they developed the world's first epigenetic biomarker for biological age read from saliva.

Their flagship partnership is with Bayer Consumer Health. In March 2025 the two announced InflammAge, a DNA methylation biomarker for systemic chronic inflammation read from saliva, validated against the Generation Scotland cohort of 18,000 people with the Universities of Birmingham and Edinburgh. On many of the diseases tested it outperforms CRP, the standard clinical measure. In October 2025 their Biomarker Discovery Engine was shortlisted for the Research Project Award at the Lab Awards.

They employ over 50 people globally, across the UK, EMEA and North America.

How they perform on cord

• Third out of every company of their size on cord for responsiveness, in cord's UK Tech Hiring Rankings in December 2025. Tenth for how fast they respond.

• Two hires closed and the account paused each time, because the role was filled.

• The salary published on the role, rather than held back until a call.

• One person on the account. The CTO.

Those rankings are the number worth dwelling on. They are built from cord's own data on how quickly companies reply to the people who message them. There is no submission process and no way to game it. You either reply or you don't.

For anyone who has applied for engineering jobs, that matters more than a benefits list, because silence is the default experience of job hunting. Hurdle are measurably one of the least silent companies in UK tech.

Why engineers stay once they get there

The work has consequences, and they say so. Tom Stubbs' framing is that every diagnostic test they enable sits behind a decision with real stakes: a treatment plan, a diagnosis, or someone trying to find out what is wrong with them. That is not marketing language, it is what the code does.

The engineering is harder than the job spec suggests. Their backend work is Node.js, TypeScript and AWS. The wider problem spans structured and unstructured health records in FHIR, HL7 and OMOP, clinical natural language processing with models like BioBERT and ClinicalBERT, ICD and SNOMED coding, genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics, MRI and pathology imaging, and techniques that preserve privacy, including federated learning. They are also hiring a Head of Development to build their first Software as a Medical Device product. If you want to know whether your code matters, regulatory classification is a fairly unambiguous answer.

Four interview steps, and the first one is the CTO. Twenty minutes with Rob, then 60 minutes technical with the team, then 30 minutes on culture, then meet in person. At most companies you speak to three people before anyone technical reads your CV. Here the person who wrote the ad is the first conversation.

Equity, and take the leave you need. Private health insurance through Vitality with dental from day one, pension, enhanced paternity leave, a MacBook Pro and a remote working setup. For a company of 50 with a Bayer partnership, the equity is not a rounding error. They hire in London, hybrid or remote.

They did the unglamorous work on their own culture. They brought in an external people and culture partner and rebuilt their values, pay philosophy, benefits, onboarding and performance process. Employee engagement rose 14 points to 81%. On Indeed, their London reviews average 4.7 out of 5, and the recurring theme is the range of new problems people get handed.

The team doing the hiring

One person, which is the whole point.

• Rob Thompson, co-founder and CTO. He oversees product, engineering and design, and he is the named contact on their engineering roles. He has hired through cord before, twice pausing the account because the role was filled.

There is no talent team between you and him.

Highlighted Companies is a series of hand picked companies on cord. Data sourced from cord, September 2026.