Software Engineer, Platform

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.

We're hiring backend 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 you could end up owning any (or even all) of the following:

• Designing (and productionizing) our backend API and data models.

• Defining and implementing our database schema and data pipelines; optimizing database queries.

• Standing up and iterating on our front-end stack.

• Designing (and productionizing) our cloud infrastructure stack (e.g., cloud providers, content-serving, hosting, deployment).

• Building out our deployment system.

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

Great candidates will have demonstrated, deep experience with backend Python development and building performant, robust cloud infrastructure at scale. Strong familiarity with the Python ecosystem is a bonus.

Great candidates will also be able to work across the stack where needed. There will be a lot of "startup engineering": figuring out how to move quickly while investing heavily in the areas and decisions that really matter.

• 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 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 conversation with our founder, Charlie, where we discuss our company culture, your own goals, and how they map to the role.

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