Software Engineer, Infra

Astral

At Astral, our mission is to make the Python ecosystem more productive by building next-generation developer tools — tools that enable developers to ship great software, faster.

To start, we've built Ruff, an extremely fast Python linter and formatter; and uv, a comprehensive Python package manager — two of the fastest-growing developer tools ever.

Next, we're continuing to push the future of Python with a state-of-the-art type checker — and building out our first hosted services.

Our early team includes the authors of ripgrep, bat, hyperfine, and maturin; early, core contributors to Biome and Prefect; and multiple CPython core developers — all building at the intersection of Rust and Python.

The Role

We're hiring product and infrastructure engineers to build our first hosted product.

This is a full-stack, greenfield effort to build an entirely new product, atop and integrated with Astral's open source tooling. You'll be part of a small team, shipping alongside our CEO and iterating rapidly with world-class design partners.

In this role, you would significantly influence the technical stack and technical direction of the product, and could end up owning any (or even all) of the following:

• Choosing our hosting and cloud provider(s).

• Building out our deployment system.

• Designing (and productionizing) our cloud storage and content serving strategies.

• Designing (and productionizing) our backend API.

• Designing (and productionizing) our database schema and infrastructure.

• Navigating on-prem, Bring Your Own Cloud, and other deployment models.

Great candidates will have demonstrated, deep expertise building highly performant, highly robust cloud infrastructure at scale — and the ability to bring that experience to bear in a startup environment (figuring out how to move quickly while investing heavily in the areas and decisions that really matter).

The Team

• We're not only remote, but highly distributed. We hire from Pacific Time (e.g., San Francisco, USA) to Central European Time (e.g., Munich, Germany), and get together twice annually for week-long, in-person on-sites.

• We pay competitively (salary and equity) and offer comprehensive benefits (healthcare and more).

• Our work is highly collaborative, but as is common in open source, much of that collaboration takes place asynchronously (in Discord, or GitHub, or Notion). We minimize meetings, and maximize time spent working in code.

• We're a small, high-trust team. We strive to ship excellent software, at a fast pace. We have a lot of fun doing it. (See: Our Values.)

Our Process

Our hiring process is entirely remote and does not include any live coding segments. While the process may vary from candidate to candidate, it generally consists of three phases, each designed to mimic the kind of engagement and interactions you'd have as a member of the team:

1. A take-home project, where we ask you to build out a tool based on a pre-defined specification.

2. A presentation, where we ask you to present on some of your own work, and have the kind of technical conversation you'd have as a member of the team, grounded in something that you know well.

3. A co-working engagement, where we spend time working through issues and pull requests together.

Along the way, we'll talk through your background and interests to determine whether Astral is a good fit for your career goals.