We hire practitioners.
Not theorists.
If you've spent years finding what's actually broken in institutions — and you have the results and the scars to prove it — we want to hear from you. We are not building a consulting factory. We are building a pattern library for institutional diagnosis. That requires a very specific kind of mind.
What we look for.
We are not looking for people who are good at consulting. We are looking for people who are good at diagnosis — which is a different skill entirely. Consultants find solutions. Diagnosticians find causes. Most people who have spent 15+ years in their field have learned to reach for solutions before they have understood the problem. We are looking for the exceptions.
You have seen the same categories of dysfunction repeat across industries. You have noticed that the presenting problem is rarely the actual problem. You have the uncomfortable habit of asking the question nobody in the room wants to ask. You have been right more often than your clients expected — and occasionally been right in ways that cost you the engagement.
That is who we are looking for.
Current openings.
We operate on a partner model. Every engagement is delivered by a senior practitioner — no delegation to analysts. As we grow, we add partners, not staff. Here is what we are actively looking for and what we are watching for:
Diagnostic Partner — Financial Systems
Watching — Not Urgently HiringWe are watching for a practitioner with 15+ years in financial diagnostics — someone who can look at a company's numbers and identify structural dysfunction in the cost base, capital allocation, or pricing model without needing six weeks of analysis. Background in institutional finance, PE-backed operations, or CFO-level transformation preferred.
What this is not: This is not a CFO role. This is not a financial controller role. This is a diagnostic partner role. You will spend most of your time listening to clients describe symptoms, and your job is to identify what those symptoms are actually telling us.
Diagnostic Partner — People & Organisational Systems
Watching — Not Urgently HiringWe frequently encounter organisations where the root cause of operational dysfunction is embedded in the people cylinder — misaligned incentives, leadership behaviour that produces predictable team failure, cultural patterns that prevent execution. We are watching for a practitioner who has the rare ability to diagnose this without being soft about it.
Not an HR role: We are not looking for someone who manages people. We are looking for someone who can diagnose why organisations systematically misuse, alienate, or exhaust their best people — and articulate it precisely enough that leadership can act on it.
Research Associate — CAUSAL_CHAIN_DB Enrichment
Open — Part Time / FlexibleKernorigin's diagnostic engine runs on a proprietary pattern database — a structured library of root cause chains built from 25 years of institutional transformation work. We are looking for a rigorous researcher to help us document, validate, and enrich these patterns across industries.
What you will do: Interview partners, review case notes, encode causal chains into the database schema (L0 observable metric → L5 structural root cause), and validate that the patterns are specific enough to be diagnostically useful. This is not writing work. This is analytical encoding work.
Background: MBA or equivalent analytical training. Prior exposure to management consulting case methodology or academic qualitative research. Extreme attention to specificity — the ability to tell the difference between "revenue is declining" and "close rate dropped from 34% to 17% in Q3 2024 in the enterprise segment while SMB held flat."
How we work.
No junior buffer
Partners do the work. Every client conversation, every diagnostic session, every report review happens at partner level. We have no analysts to delegate to — and we like it that way.
Radical honesty
We tell clients what we find. Including when the finding is uncomfortable for the client — or when the finding is that they don't need us. This is non-negotiable.
Root cause first
We never recommend a solution before we have understood the cause. We have walked away from engagements that required us to skip this step. We will continue to do so.
Distributed globally
Partners work from where they are based. We have operated across India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North America since 2001. Location is not a filter.
This is not the right firm if:
- You want to build a team beneath you
- You want a guaranteed pipeline and a predictable income
- You prefer to present solutions rather than sit in diagnostic uncertainty
- You think AI will do most of the analytical work in 3 years
- You have been in consulting for 20 years and have never told a client something they did not want to hear
We say this not to be exclusive — but because the wrong fit wastes everyone's time. We would rather be direct now than polite later.
How to start a conversation.
We do not accept CVs as a first contact. If you are interested in Kernorigin, send us a short note (200 words maximum) describing one diagnosis you made — in any professional context — where you identified the root cause of something that others had misdiagnosed. What was the symptom? What was the real cause? How did you know?
That one paragraph tells us more about whether you belong here than any resume could.
Send it to the contact form below. Subject line: "Practitioner Conversation — [Your Name]"
Send Your Diagnostic Note →Kernorigin operates as a boutique firm by design. We take on a limited number of partners and a limited number of engagements each year. This is deliberate. We are not trying to scale a consulting firm. We are trying to maintain the diagnostic quality that makes us worth hiring in the first place.