Backend Rust Engineer

Remote (American or European time zones) or Boulder, Colorado

Zed is a fast, collaborative code editor built from the ground up in Rust. We're seeking a Backend Engineer with a strong Rust background to own and maintain our server-side infrastructure.

The server-side infrastructure powers many of Zed's core features: all AI connections go through this system, as do the collaboration primitives, in addition to cross-cutting concerns like auth, billing and telemetry. We are currently rebuilding our backend from a single stateful server to a fully distributed system, and looking for someone to help lead this effort.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design and implement reliable, high-performant backend systems in Rust
  • Build on Zed's existing deterministic test execution environment to allow us to make large changes with confidence
  • Contribute to architectural decisions that shape Zed's future
  • Solve complex product challenges, drawing on your systems programming background when needed
  • Collaborate with designers and engineers to create intuitive user interfaces
  • Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code
  • Participate in code reviews and collaborate with teammates and community members in real time
  • Help improve our development processes and tooling
  • Optimize performance and user experience where necessary

Requirements

  • Strong proficiency in Rust
  • Experience deploying and maintaining distributed systems in production
  • Solid understanding of algorithms and data structures
  • Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
  • Strong product sense and user-centric design approach
  • Self-directed work ethic and ability to operate autonomously
  • Excellent communication skills for remote collaboration
  • Willingness to work on both backend and frontend aspects of the application
  • Enthusiasm for pair programming, including several hours weekly in Zed

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with Cloudflare's worker infrastructure
  • Knowledge of database performance characteristics, particularly PostgreSQL and SQLite.
  • Familiarity with tracing, logging and telemetry tools like Axiom or Honeycomb.
  • Background in building real-time collaborative systems
  • Knowledge of cross-platform development challenges
  • Experience working on product code, front-end, or full-stack development

Join us in revolutionizing the development experience. Your expertise could drive Zed's next game-changing feature!

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