Founding Engineer - Open Source

We are looking for our first Founding Engineer to join us in building the future of infrastructure tooling. This is an onsite role - you will be working alongside founders in our office in San Francisco.

*** this is NOT a DevOps / Infra / SRE role ***

About Us

We are building an AI agent for DevOps - smart enough for developers to not have to understand infrastructure, and secure enough for infra engineers to trust it. We’ve already built a popular open-source runner for IaC, and co-founded OpenTofu, an MPL fork of Terraform.

We are a team of 3 founders: Igor, Mohamed and Utpal. Before this, we’ve been building cool things at Amazon, Fitbit and Palantir. We have just raised a seed round led by Initialized Capital and some of the best devtools angels (Olivier Pomel, David Cramer, Ben Porterfield, Michael Grinich, many others) and moved from London to SF bay area.

About You

• You are excited to be the first hire on a small but heavyweight team where no job is too big or too small
• You have industry experience, ideally 2-3 years in early stage startups. You know how to ship commercial software, but haven’t yet slowed down to big-tech pace.
• You have experience configuring cloud infrastructure with IaC (Terraform / Pulumi / CloudFormation / K8S / etc). We're not looking for a DevOps / SRE expert - this is a software engineering role - but some prior exposure to the infra side is a must.
• You can design and competently reason about complex distributed systems.
• You can build UIs that are delightful to use.
• You can ship quality code fast. You know your tools but your are not attached to them. Today we mostly use Typescript and Go but it may change (we moved from Python to Go in a week).
• You have strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals and mathematics.

Nice to haves

• Deep experience with infrastructure / DevOps / SRE tooling - AWS, Terraform, K8S, Golang ecosystems. We are building infrastructure tooling, so if you've done a lot of infra work in the past that's great.
• Experience with or passion about open-source. A large chunk of what we do is open-source, so it’s helpful if you know how to make the community happy.

Not you

Let’s call this guy Ben. He’s the opposite of what we are looking for.

• Ben prefers working from home, or better - from Bali. He believes that he can be productive from anywhere.
• Ben hates talking to customers. He believes that his only job is to write code, and everything else should be done by someone else.
• Ben loves his favourite frontend framework and hates building backend services or CLIs in other languages. He thinks that he was hired to do one thing well.

What you will work on

You will own development of our products end-to-end (UI, backend, infrastructure, CLIs). The role says “Open-Source” - this means that as of today, we believe that it’s our open-source offering that need the most attention. But this will change too. As of today, we have a growing list of issues raised by the community, and lots of opportunities for making our open-source the de-facto choice for IaC automation.

Our space is quite niche; if you’re not into IaC chances are that the acronym TACO doesn’t ring a bell - search for "pains in terraform collaboration" and the first article that comes up should be a good starting point.

What we’ve built so far is good but it’s at best 10% of what needs to be built. Instead of listing responsibilities, here are the questions that we hope you’ll help us answer (by building and talking to users):

• Should an open-source TACO have UI? If so, of what kind? We’ve built 3 versions so far and keen to get it right
• How should we deal with state? Today we support external state in S3, GCS and Azure object storage, but controlling state files could improve handling of dependencies, drift, etc.
• We’re relying on GitHub Actions for compute which makes the orchestrator lightweight and secure, but this design choice is quite limiting. Should we also build managed runners? Or instead have separate integrations for every CI provider / K8S?

Compensation

• 0.5% - 2.0% equity
• $150k - $200k salary
• Health insurance
• Free lunch in the office

Interview process

• You will meet founders for 30-45 minutes each, one after another, in person in downtown SF. The whole thing should fit in a 2-hour block.
• We will ask you a bunch of technical, product as well as totally random questions. No coding puzzles (we can check your github). We just want to understand how you reason about building software products and businesses.
• We will get back to you with either an offer or rejection within 24 hours.