Hired Through GitHub: Part 1

At Zed Industries, most hiring follows the traditional path: developers find roles on our jobs page, apply, and interview with the team through technical pairing sessions and culture conversations.

But some developers find their way to the team through a different route entirely.

Recognition Through Contributions

The alternative path starts in our GitHub repository. We regularly notice community members who consistently ship quality PRs: fixing bugs, implementing requested features, and improving the editor.

These contributors become familiar names in our internal Slack.

These aren't drive-by contributions. The developers we eventually hire have typically:

• Engaged with the team, either through GitHub Discussions or our Discord channel, before opening PRs to align on direction
• Demonstrated consistent code quality across multiple contributions
• Built rapport with team members through live pair programming sessions (our favorite!)
  • Zed teammates will often share links to their calendars in Discord to contributors who are interested in pairing.

When we spot this pattern, we reach out.

What follows are the stories of some of the Zed team members who earned their positions through exceptional open source contributions. This is the first in a series highlighting and celebrating these developers who believed in Zed's mission early on, contributed their time and expertise freely, and ultimately became core members of our team.

Junkui Zhang

In early 2024, Zed was only supported on macOS. Official Linux support would not be announced for another half a year, and Junkui, a student at Wuhan University, was on the lookout for a new editor.

I used to do most of my coding in VS Code and PyCharm, but honestly, both of them felt way too slow, and used a lot of RAM, especially on my laptop. So I started looking for alternatives. I gave Neovim a shot, but at the end of the day, it's not really an IDE, and for me the limitations were just too big.

Then one day I stumbled across Zed's promo online and decided to keep an eye on it. Back then, Zed wasn't open source yet and only supported macOS, so I kept waiting for any news about a Windows version. Later, I heard it had gone open source.

At the time, we had our eyes on introducing Linux support. Windows was also on our mind, but the plan was to add it after Linux. Junkui, a Windows user, recounts his first experience trying to compile and run Zed:

I still remember that day, I excitedly opened GitHub, pulled up Zed's repo, and thought, "Alright, time to build myself a Windows version of Zed!" But as soon as I opened the repo… disappointment. It was full of unimplemented! everywhere.

Junkui began opening pull requests to address missing features:

I rely heavily on font ligatures and OpenType features, so I went ahead and implemented full OpenType feature and font fallback support for Zed.

A few PRs turned into a 10-month contribution campaign that resulted in Junkui becoming our top external contributor, based on PR submission count.

Junkui applied for an internship position at Zed. The answer was obvious; Zed on Windows was becoming more and more feasible because of Junkui's additions, so we took him up!

Now, after being at Zed Industries for 9 months, Junkui remarks on his experience thus far:

I really enjoy the freedom to explore and implement new ideas, as well as the opportunity to work on a product that I genuinely care about. The team is also very supportive and collaborative, which makes it a great environment to learn and grow.

Don't hesitate to reach out and share your ideas! The team is always looking for passionate individuals who want to contribute.

Today, we have a subset of the team daily driving Zed on Windows and opening PRs. Check the Windows progress report post. 🪟

Anthony Eid

The debugger issue. The most highly-upvoted issue of all time in Zed's backlog.

• Filed in December of 2022
• 2100+ 👍s, 250+ ❤️s, 150+ 🚀s

It was abundantly clear that users were wanting to do more than just console.log() within Zed. So much so that while we were building out other editor primitives and flagship features, Remco Smits took it upon himself to start working on an implementation.

At the same time, Anthony, who had previously worked building safety critical systems in the defense industry, discovered Zed, and was drawn to it:

I first came across Zed either through Fireship or a Reddit post about it being open source.

While testing Zed, something really stood out to Anthony:

One of the biggest things was how snappy Zed felt when I used it on my laptop, and reading about GPUI. How many desktop apps nowadays are built with native code instead of web technologies? Let alone a Code Editor built with a custom graphics stack.

Anthony was also on the lookout for projects to contribute to:

I wanted to contribute to an open source project as a hobby and learn Rust because I was an embedded C dev at the time and felt that Rust would be a great language/skill to learn. I was drawn to Zed because it was a project that was focused on quality software development (performance, reliability, memory safety, etc.) and was innovating in the code editor space.

The work being done on the debugger was enticing. Anthony asked if any help was needed in early March 2024, and Remco took him up on the offer.

By June, Anthony and Remco were pairing multiple times a week, working under the hood, to build out the debugger backend infrastructure.

As the debugger work began to round out, members of the Zed team began interfacing with Remco and Anthony.

Once the debugger PR got big enough, we had a weekly meeting with Mikayla where we could ask questions and discuss the implementation details. Towards the end of the project, Piotr started working on the debugger as well. He was responsible for pushing our last major refactor before getting the debugger PR merged into Zed's main branch.

Anthony recalls how he transitioned from a contributor to a Zed team member, after working on the debugger for more than half a year:

I applied a couple of times before getting hired, but I was approached by Joseph on Discord about getting a job at Zed, which ended up getting me my first interview and hired. My only interview was with Nathan (CEO) and it felt more like a conversation about the debugger and Zed instead of a traditional technical interview. At that time I was spending a lot of time pair programming with Piotr already so I think that contributed to the relaxed atmosphere.

After being hired into Zed, Anthony, Remco, and the Zed team made the final pushes on the debugger PR to get it into a state where it could be merged into main, under a staff-only feature flag.

The details around the debugger PR reflect the sheer magnitude of this community-driven effort:

• Opened June of 2024
• 977 commits
• Touched ~26k LOC / 156 files
• 500+ 👍s, 200+ ❤️s, 150+ 🚀s
• Merged March of 2025

Now working alongside the Zed team, Anthony reflects on how he grew from the experience:

Because the debugger was self-driven between Remco and I, I was able to learn about organizing a project, working as a team, and a lot of just diving into the codebase when there were questions to be answered. I was able to jump into a problem that I had little experience in (Zed, Rust, debuggers, DAP, etc) and help create a feature that a lot of people were looking forward to and are using today! I've developed all the skills I've been using in the debugger project—I'm able to read and digest code much faster now, jump into new problems with less context, and navigate around large codebases easier.

Anthony's experience highlights what makes working at Zed unique:

Zed is a fast moving company where everyone is trusted to ship code. There's a lot of opportunity to work on interesting technical challenges and I'm able to explore solutions on my own or with other teammates. Plus Zed is a product I use practically every day and I'm able to spend time adding features that I want as well!

For those considering contributing...

Make sure you enjoy the journey and pair program with the team as much as possible.

The debugger is available to all users in Zed today, thanks to the monumental amount of time and energy Remco and Anthony invested into kickstarting it all.

The Bottom Line

At Zed, we've discovered that talent reveals itself in different ways. Some of our engineers applied through traditional channels with impressive resumes. Others first proved themselves through their contributions. This approach is part of our DNA—Zed cofounder as-cii (Antonio Scandurra) was originally hired to the Atom team after his consistent quality pull request submissions caught the team's attention!

This diversity of backgrounds makes us stronger. We whole-heartedly believe in a pair-heavy culture, that the best software comes about from multiple minds working in concert to elegantly solve complex problems—our data structures were built from the ground up with this exact kind of collaboration in mind.

At Zed, it doesn't matter whether you have a degree or taught yourself to code, whether you came through a job posting or built a relationship through open source. What matters is your passion for craftsmanship, your ability to communicate, and most importantly, that you can ship! 🚢

We're looking for people who love building great software. If that's you, we'll find each other—one way or another.