Open Source Software Engineer, General

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 always open to hiring exceptional candidates, even when we don’t have a job posting that matches your background. This is an invitation to reach out if you’re passionate about Astral’s mission and think you could make a meaningful impact. We’d love to know what you’re interested in working on, and why you’d be a great addition to the team.

Our work tends to span the spectrum from low-level Rust optimizations to high-level user experience design.

If you like hyper-optimizing parsers, you could be a good fit. If you like designing command-line interfaces or writing documentation, you could also be a good fit. Let's figure out the right role for you based on your goals and areas of interest.

Being an open source maintainer is a big part of the job too: engaging with the community, reviewing pull requests, debugging issues, and generally contributing to our culture of developing in the open.

Strong candidates tend to have deep experience with Rust, Python, open source, or developer tools — but few candidates are deep in all of these areas, and we've hired candidates without prior Rust (or Python) experience.

• 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... while having fun. (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 a command-line 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.