Applicants for a £35,000-a-year tech job have been invited to build an AI product in lieu of submitting a CV and cover letter.
Scottish tech firm DataVita today opened entries for its OpenClaw Challenge, a competition that replaces the traditional job application with building a working AI product.
The strongest submission will win a full-time, permanent position on DataVita’s AI Solutions team, with a £35,000 starting salary.
Billing itself as “Scotland fastest-growing tech company”, DataVita claims to operate Scotland’s largest Tier III certified data centres between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
It is currently expanding its Chapel Hall campus in partnership with CoreWeave, as part of Lanarkshire’s AI Growth Zone.
It hasn’t all been one-way traffic for the Scottish tech jobs scene in recent years, following the collapse of high-profile Edinburgh-based digital skills academy CodeClan in 2023 and 175-employee MSSP Adarma in 2025.
“AI has fundamentally changed what we’re looking for in new employees”
Entrants are asked to create an AI tool with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that has amassed more than 310,000 GitHub users and become one of the fastest-growing open-source projects of 2026.
No traditional application form, CV, cover letter or prior experience is required, DataVita stressed.
Submissions are judged on “originality, technical thinking, business value, security, and communication”, the firm added.
“For certain roles, AI has fundamentally changed what we’re looking for in new employees,” DataVita MD Danny Quinn stated.
“Critical thinking, self-learning, and a fundamental understanding of how technology interacts are more important than ever.
“We’re seeing it inside our own business – young, supposedly inexperienced people coming in and taking new approaches to age-old problems. It’s a completely different way of thinking and those capabilities are showing up in places traditional hiring has not always looked. What someone can build on their own often tells us more than their background alone.
