Career

Work on RockyGuard

Rocky Software Inc. builds RockyGuard, a tamper-resistant C++17 licensing library for desktop and server applications. We are a small Canadian-owned software startup with an office in downtown Toronto; below is the honest state of who we're looking for and how to introduce yourself.

Open positions

Rocky Software Inc. is a small Canadian-owned software startup with an office in downtown Toronto. Both roles below are four-month internships; you can come into the Toronto office or work fully remote, whichever fits you better.

Software Development Intern

Toronto or remote

4 months · $22/hour

Work alongside the core team on the RockyGuard C++17 library, the CLI tools, and the QA harness suite. Suitable for an undergraduate co-op term; we can also accommodate self-directed candidates who are not in school. C++ experience required.

Full description →
Marketing Intern

Toronto or remote

4 months · $18/hour

Help us reach the engineering teams who would benefit from RockyGuard but have not heard of it yet. Website copy, technical-audience social content (primarily LinkedIn), blog drafting, and lightweight analytics. Suitable for a co-op term or a focused career-change project.

Full description →

What you'd work on

Whether the role is engineering, customer success, or technical writing, you would be working on or alongside these areas. The library is small, adversarial in design, and meant to be inspected: the same code paths that gate a paid customer's license also gate ours.

Cross-platform C++17

Windows + Linux + (planned) macOS. CMake + vcpkg. Single shared codebase; per-platform code paths only where the OS forces it (hardware fingerprinting, time-anchor storage locations).

Security primitives

OpenSSL-backed signatures (Ed25519 + RSA-SHA256), HMAC-protected state files, SHA-256 binary self-check, multi-location time anchors. Adversarial test harnesses for every defense.

Floating-license server

Thread-pooled HTTP server with optional TLS, per-machine seat caps, lease reaping, log rotation. Hardened against slow-HTTP, JSON fuzzing, connection floods.

Customer-facing docs

We ship the QA report, Phase 4.1 onboarding dry-run, future roadmap, and full library docs alongside every release. Doc quality is treated as load-bearing, not optional.

How we work

› Small team. Decisions ship the same week they're made.
› Doc-first: every nontrivial change updates the manual and regenerates the PDFs alongside the code.
› Honest pre-release QA: ten-phase plan with adversarial harnesses, three independent customer-onboarding cold-reads per release, public Phase 4.1 reports.
› No SaaS / no telemetry. The library runs offline on customer hardware; we cannot phone home even if we wanted to.

Position details

Long-form descriptions for the two openings above. If you are unsure whether you qualify, send us a note anyway — we read everything.

Software Development Intern

Toronto or remote · 4 months · $22/hour

Rocky Software Inc. is a small Canadian-owned software startup with an office in downtown Toronto; the founder writes most of the code today. You would be the second pair of hands on the codebase: an actual engineer, not a make-work intern. Expect code review on every PR, real responsibility for the work you ship, and visibility into every decision the company makes during your term.

What you'd work on

›Concrete features on the RockyGuard core library (C++17, OpenSSL, CMake + vcpkg, Windows + Linux). Recent examples: runtime version-range matcher, per-machine seat cap on the floating-license server, log rotation. Scope you take on is calibrated to your starting level.
›Tests and QA harnesses. Every defense in the library has an adversarial test (the file-lock attack harness, the time-traveler harness, the ghost-checkout exhaustion harness). Writing a new one for a new feature is a normal task.
›Customer-integration tools and examples. The shipped examples/ tree and the CLI tools (license_create, license_verify, rg_floating_server, etc.) are first-class engineering, not afterthoughts.
›Documentation that explains your code. Every nontrivial change updates the customer manual and the PDFs are regenerated alongside the code; doc quality is part of the definition of done, not optional polish.

What we look for

›Working knowledge of C++ (any modern dialect; we use C++17). You do not need to be an expert — a personal project, a strong undergraduate course sequence, or a clean Git history of self-driven work is enough.
›Comfort with one of: Windows + MSVC, Linux + GCC/Clang, or both. CMake exposure is a plus; we will teach the rest of the toolchain.
›Curiosity about how things actually work end to end. Licensing intersects with cryptography, OS internals, networking, and adversarial testing — a willingness to read the OpenSSL docs or a Windows registry reference is what separates the people who thrive here from the people who get stuck.
›Clear written communication. PR descriptions, commit messages, and doc updates carry as much weight here as the code itself.

Logistics

›Four-month term. Suitable for a Canadian co-op semester or an equivalent self-directed block of time.
›$22/hour. Full-time hours during the term.
›Downtown Toronto office or fully remote, your choice. If remote, plan for overlap with Eastern timezone working hours for daily standup and code-review turnaround.

Email career@rockyguard.dev →

Marketing Intern

Toronto or remote · 4 months · $18/hour

Rocky Software Inc. is a small Canadian-owned software startup based in downtown Toronto, selling a niche developer tool (a C++ licensing library) to engineering teams. The marketing job here is the opposite of consumer marketing: precision over volume, technical credibility over polished slogans, and long-form content over hot takes. You would work directly with the founder on a small set of focused experiments rather than running a top-of-funnel firehose.

What you'd work on

›Website copy and SEO. Audit existing pages on rockyguard.dev; draft new ones (case studies, comparison pages, FAQ entries). The site is small and tractable — you can read everything in one sitting.
›Technical-audience social content. Primarily LinkedIn (where C++ engineering managers live). Authoring posts that engineers actually read, not generic SaaS-marketing fluff.
›Blog drafting and the engineering-newsletter pipeline. We have a backlog of release-engineering and security-engineering stories from the v1.2.0 / v1.2.1 cycles that deserve write-ups.
›Lightweight analytics. Reading the Cloudflare and search-console dashboards, calling out what is working and what is not, and proposing what to try next.

What we look for

›Comfort writing for a technical audience. You do not need to be a programmer; you do need to be willing to read an engineering blog and understand the shape of it. A portfolio of writing — school newspaper, personal blog, well-organised LinkedIn presence, anything — helps a lot.
›Self-direction. We will not hand you a marketing playbook; together we will figure out what works for our specific product and audience.
›Honesty over hype. The brand voice across rockyguard.dev is plain, factual, and quick to admit what the product is not. If high-energy marketing copy is your thing, this role probably is not.
›Curiosity about software businesses. You do not need a CS background, but you should be interested in how a small B2B software company actually finds and keeps its customers.

Logistics

›Four-month term. Suitable for a Canadian co-op semester, a focused career-change project, or an equivalent self-directed block of time.
›$18/hour. Full-time hours during the term.
›Downtown Toronto office or fully remote, your choice. If remote, plan for overlap with Eastern timezone working hours for our weekly sync and quick feedback loops.

Email career@rockyguard.dev →

Get in touch

Email your application to career@rockyguard.dev, or use the contact form with reason “Career: introduce yourself”. Tell us what you're looking for, what you've built, and any public artifacts (repo, paper, talk, write-up) that show your work.