What Sanity 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.

Sanity is a headless content platform – structured content infrastructure for teams that have outgrown WordPress, Contentful, or whatever CMS they started with. Instead of treating content as pages and documents, Sanity treats it as structured data you can reuse anywhere: a website, a mobile app, an in-store screen, and increasingly the models and agents behind AI features.

The company was founded in Oslo in 2015, with Simen Svale Skogsrud among the founding team. It has raised more than US$170 million in venture funding across several rounds, including an $85 million round in 2025, and now positions itself as a content backend for AI-driven content operations as much as a classic CMS. Its customers range from small agencies to large, well-known brands. Developers and editorial teams tend to like it because the editing interface can be customised to fit the exact content a team works with, while editors get fast, real-time collaborative editing rather than a clunky admin panel.

Remote culture: what it’s actually like

Here is the honest headline, and it matters for anyone reading this in the “remote-first” cluster: Sanity is remote-friendly, not strictly remote-first. It keeps offices – Oslo is the anchor, with a San Francisco presence and a London hub – and it runs a mix of fully remote and hybrid roles. Its careers materials describe flexible hours and “optional home office / remote in periods” rather than a no-office, work-from-anywhere default. A large share of open roles are remote, but some are explicitly hybrid and tied to a city.

So if your mental model of remote-first is Ghost or Tailscale – no office anywhere, presence never expected – Sanity is a step across from that. It’s genuinely flexible and hires remote people across Europe, but there’s real office gravity, particularly around Oslo. That’s not a criticism; it’s just the accurate picture, and it’s worth knowing before you apply.

The Norwegian and Nordic core shapes the culture: pragmatic, craft-focused, with European norms around working hours and time off. The product itself – real-time, multi-user editing with conflict resolution – has clearly influenced how the company thinks about distributed collaboration.

The honest assessment: if you specifically want a company with zero office and zero location expectations, check each role carefully, because some Sanity positions carry a hybrid or timezone requirement. If you want a European-rooted scale-up that supports remote work without pretending offices don’t exist, it’s a strong fit.

Hiring in Europe: the details

Countries: Strong European base – recent openings have spanned Norway, the UK, Germany, and wider Europe, alongside the US and Canada. Norway and the UK are the clearest centres of gravity.

Employment model: A mix of direct employment in countries where Sanity has established entities (Norway, the UK, and the US among them) and other arrangements elsewhere. Confirm the specific model for any role you’re interested in – it varies by country.

Timezone expectations: Many roles are Europe-friendly and align naturally with Nordic hours. Some positions note overlap requirements, and a few are hybrid rather than fully remote, so read the location line on each listing.

Salary approach: Competitive and benchmarked against market data. Sanity does not publish a public salary formula, so compensation is discussed during the hiring process rather than posted openly.

Language requirements: English is the working language.

Who they’re looking for

Sanity hires across:

  • Software engineering (TypeScript, React, Node.js, real-time systems)
  • Design
  • Developer relations
  • Product management
  • Solutions and systems engineering
  • Sales, customer solutions, and account management
  • Marketing
  • People and operations

The bias is towards people who care about craft – structured data, maintainable code, interfaces that real editorial teams actually want to use. Generic enthusiasm gets filtered; specific, considered interest in how content infrastructure works travels much further.

What current and former employees say

The praise tends to cluster around the quality of the engineering, the genuine developer-friendliness of both product and culture, and the European working norms – reasonable hours, real time off, a craft-first attitude. People who value building something technically serious rather than shipping fast and breaking things tend to be happy here.

The cons are worth naming honestly. Sanity is a venture-backed scale-up that has raised significant capital and pivoted hard towards AI content operations – that means priorities can shift, and roles can change shape as the company chases a fast-moving market. The remote setup is real but not absolute: office and hybrid expectations exist, so “remote” is not guaranteed for every role. And as with any funded scale-up, the pace and the pressure to grow are present in a way they aren’t at a bootstrapped company.

People who thrive at Sanity tend to be craft-focused engineers and designers, comfortable with European working culture, who want a serious product and don’t mind a company that keeps a foot in the office as well as the cloud.

How to apply

Specific tips: Build something real with Sanity before you apply – the free tier is generous, and a portfolio piece or side project gives you genuine product insight that shows immediately in an interview. Read the location and remote/hybrid line on each role carefully so you apply for something that actually matches your situation. Engage with the developer community – Sanity has an active Slack and GitHub presence, and helping out before you apply puts your name in the room. If you’re an engineer who genuinely enjoys structured data and real-time systems, or a designer who has built CMSes that editorial teams like using, lead with that.

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