Founding Engineer - Open Source

Digger•San Francisco, CA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

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. 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 and moved from London to SF. 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. 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 - here’s some context. 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?

Requirements

Excited to be the first hire on a small but heavyweight team where no job is too big or too small.
Industry experience, ideally 2-3 years in early stage startups.
Experience shipping commercial software at a pace not slowed down by big-tech.
Experience configuring cloud infrastructure with IaC (Terraform / Pulumi / CloudFormation / K8S / etc).
Prior exposure to the infra side is a must (this is a software engineering role, not DevOps/SRE).
Ability to design and competently reason about complex distributed systems.
Ability to build UIs that are delightful to use.
Ability to ship quality code fast.
Familiarity with tools but not attached to them (current primary languages are Typescript and Go, but this may change).
Strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals and mathematics.

Nice To Haves

Deep experience with infrastructure / DevOps / SRE tooling (AWS, Terraform, K8S, Golang ecosystems).
Significant prior infra work experience.
Experience with or passion about open-source.
Understanding of how to engage and satisfy an open-source community.

Responsibilities

Own development of our products end-to-end (UI, backend, infrastructure, CLIs).
Address issues raised by the community for the open-source offering.
Contribute to making the open-source offering the de-facto choice for IaC automation.
Design and build solutions for state management in IaC.
Evaluate and potentially build managed runners or separate integrations for CI providers/K8S.