What Ghost does

Remote Work Europe sees the daily pattern of European remote job postings through our Connected job board – the trends this piece describes show up there too.

Ghost is an open-source publishing platform – a modern alternative to WordPress for newsletters, blogs, and membership publications. Writers, journalists, and independent creators use it to handle publishing, email delivery, and paid subscriptions in one tool, without depending on a big newsletter platform that could change its rules overnight.

Ghost was founded in 2013 by John O’Nolan and Hannah Wolfe, starting life as a Kickstarter-funded WordPress alternative. It has grown into the platform behind many of the best-known independent media properties on the web. The software is open source and on GitHub; the money comes from Ghost(Pro), its managed hosting service. Structurally, Ghost is unusual: it is run by a non-profit foundation with no shareholders or venture investors, and its constitution means the organisation can never be bought or sold. One hundred per cent of revenue is reinvested into the product and the team.

Remote culture: what it’s actually like

Ghost has been fully remote since 2013 and has never had an office. The team spans multiple continents – by the foundation’s own account, five continents, sixteen nationalities, and fifteen languages – and operates on freedom and trust rather than meetings. Most staff have only one or two video calls a week; the default is asynchronous, written work.

Two things define the culture. First, the non-profit structure genuinely changes the incentives: there’s no exit to chase and no investor growth target, so decisions are made on long-term grounds. Second, Ghost is committed to staying small – it has said it will never grow beyond around 50 people, and at the time of writing the team is in the mid-thirties. That cap is deliberate, described as a forcing function for better decisions.

The honest assessment: that same cap is the catch. A team this small, held small on purpose, hires very rarely – and when it isn’t hiring, there’s no queue to join, only a mailing list to watch. Career progression is naturally limited in a ~35-person organisation with no plans to expand. If you want a fast ladder or a big team to grow within, Ghost isn’t that. If you want deep ownership in a stable, mission-led, genuinely remote team, few companies match it.

Hiring in Europe: the details

Countries: Ghost hires internationally rather than from a fixed country list, and has no office anywhere. Roles are usually open to remote applicants wherever the foundation can legally support employment.

Employment model: A distributed team employed or contracted across many countries. Because the team is tiny and global, the exact arrangement depends on where you are – confirm it for any specific role.

Timezone expectations: Work-from-anywhere with minimal synchronous requirements. Written, async communication is the default, which makes Ghost genuinely timezone-tolerant compared with most employers.

Salary approach: Competitive and benchmarked. Ghost does not publish a public salary formula, so pay is discussed during hiring.

Language requirements: English is the working language.

Who they’re looking for

Ghost is genuinely small and hires infrequently. When roles do open, they tend to be:

  • Software engineering (Node.js, Ember, JavaScript across the stack)
  • Product engineering (people who do both product and engineering work)
  • Customer support
  • Marketing and content
  • Operations

Because the team is so small, every hire carries weight, and the bar is high. Ghost looks for people who think carefully about media, publishing, and creator economics, and who write clearly – publishing platforms attract people who care about writing, and it shows in what they expect from applicants.

What current and former employees say

The praise is consistent: a four-day work week, generous time off, twice-yearly in-person retreats, real autonomy, and the rare experience of working somewhere with no investor pressure and a clear reason to exist. People who value calm, deliberate, well-run remote work tend to be very happy at Ghost.

The cons are structural rather than cultural. The deliberately small, capped team means roles almost never open, so simply getting in is the hardest part. Progression is limited by design – there aren’t many rungs on the ladder in a team this size. And a small team shipping a mature platform can feel slow-paced compared with a funded scale-up; that’s a feature for some people and a frustration for others.

People who thrive at Ghost tend to be self-directed writers-who-code or engineers-who-write, who care about independent publishing as a craft and want stability over hypergrowth.

How to apply

Specific tips: Run a Ghost site before you apply – your own blog, a newsletter, a portfolio piece. There’s a free trial on Ghost(Pro), or you can self-host. Being a real user puts you ahead of most applicants. Contribute on GitHub if you’re technical: in a team this small, even a documentation fix or a thoughtful issue gets noticed. Above all, demonstrate that you take publishing seriously as a craft – if you’ve built a newsletter or run a publication, lead with that.

See our full guide to Remote-First Companies That Actually Hire in Europe.