DataVita opens AI job contest with GBP £35,000 salary

DataVita has opened entries for the OpenClaw Challenge, a recruitment contest that offers a permanent job to the strongest applicant. The role is on the company's AI Solutions team and carries a starting salary of £35,000.

Instead of a standard application process, candidates must build a working AI product using OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent. No CV or cover letter is required, and no prior experience is needed.

Applicants will be judged on originality, technical thinking, business value, security and communication. Entry is open to anyone aged 18 or over who has the right to work in the UK and lives within commuting distance of DataVita's central Scotland offices.

The challenge is aimed at people at the start of their careers, including students, self-taught developers and career changers. The successful entrant will receive a full-time role with 33 days of annual leave, private healthcare, an electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme and a 5 per cent matched pension.

Hiring shift

The move reflects a broader shift in how some technology employers assess candidates for AI-related roles. Rather than relying on formal qualifications or previous job titles, DataVita wants to see what applicants can build, how they approach a problem and how clearly they can explain the result.

The approach comes as the Scottish data centre operator expands its work in AI infrastructure and services. Its AI Solutions team works with customers to build AI products on top of the company's infrastructure, focusing on production systems rather than prototypes.

The hire comes during a period of expansion for the business. DataVita recently announced a partnership with CoreWeave in its AI Growth Zone in Lanarkshire, while recent customer wins include Glasgow City Council and University College London.

Danny Quinn explained why the company chose a build challenge instead of a conventional hiring process.

"For certain roles, AI has fundamentally changed what we're looking for in new employees. 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.

"We picked OpenClaw because it brings together a range of different approaches and technologies, so getting anywhere with it means you can think across domains. And because it's so new, there's no textbook, no course and no short cut. The only way to learn it is to experiment, test and figure it out yourself. If someone has built something real with OpenClaw, we already know they think differently and can teach themselves.

"There are people out there right now, often building as hobbyists in their own time, creating genuinely brilliant products with OpenClaw. Most of them have no idea how valuable their skill set actually is. A CV will not tell us who they are, but a working product will.

"For this role, we don't care about your experience. If you're straight out of school, have never worked or are in a job with no connection to IT but are passionate about this technology, submit an idea. Anyone with the right attitude will get an unbelievable opportunity to work on the deployment of AI as part of one of the most exciting teams in the country," said Danny Quinn, managing director of DataVita.

Open-source route

DataVita describes OpenClaw as a free, open-source AI agent that can connect to large language models and carry out tasks such as sending messages, calling APIs, managing files and running workflows. According to the company, the software has attracted more than 310,000 GitHub users and has become one of the fastest-growing open-source projects of 2026.

By centring the contest on OpenClaw, DataVita is also tying recruitment to a tool that is still too new for formal training routes. That means candidates are expected to learn through experimentation rather than classroom instruction, an approach the company argues better reveals independent problem-solving.

Founded in 2014, DataVita operates data centres between Glasgow and Edinburgh and provides cloud and connectivity services alongside AI infrastructure. The business is home to one of the UK government's designated AI Growth Zones and is expanding its Chapel Hall campus in partnership with CoreWeave.

The OpenClaw Challenge gives one applicant a direct route into a paid AI role without a conventional interview-led screening process, with submissions judged on the strength of a working product rather than a formal employment record.