[Hiring] Backend Engineer @Zed

Role Description

Zed is building tools for people who care deeply about making software. We’re looking for an experienced backend engineer to help build the cloud services behind Zed and Delta.

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.

Our cloud capabilities are growing faster than the team’s capacity to build them. We need someone who can become a trusted technical partner to the engineers already doing this work: shaping projects, writing code, making sound decisions, and sharing responsibility for the system in production.

This is primarily a software engineering role. Most of your time will go toward building backend software, but you’ll also need to understand and help own the infrastructure it runs on.

What you’ll work on

• Building Cloud Runners that provide ephemeral compute for development work.
• Evolving billing to support new products, pricing, and packaging.
• Integrating with identity providers and developing authorization capabilities.
• Building integrations that connect Zed and Delta to developers’ existing workflows.

Some projects involve unfamiliar technical challenges. Others are straightforward capabilities that customers and the business need. We’re looking for someone who takes care with both and enjoys moving between different kinds of work as priorities evolve.

Our cloud backend is built in Rust, including services compiled to WebAssembly and running on Cloudflare Workers. We use managed infrastructure to reduce operational work and invest in tests that exercise complete workflows across clients and services.

What you’ll do

• Turn emerging needs into shipped capabilities.
• Work with engineering and product partners to clarify problems, choose a practical scope, and carry projects through implementation, rollout, and operation.
• Share technical stewardship of the cloud system.
• Develop the context and judgment to make consequential decisions, guide work, and become someone teammates can turn to without routing every question through the same person.
• Stay hands-on.
• Write and review code, investigate difficult bugs, and work through the details that make a service correct, maintainable, and reliable.
• Make deliberate trade-offs.
• Recognize when a focused solution is enough, when an investment will make future work easier, and when to leave something alone.
• Help others work independently.
• Share context, give useful feedback, and improve the tests, interfaces, and documentation that support the team’s work.
• Own production behavior.
• Participate in on-call, respond to incidents, and address recurring problems in the software and infrastructure.

As you become familiar with the system, you should be able to take on significant cloud work independently while keeping the right people involved. Success means both delivering your own projects and helping the team make good decisions without depending on any one engineer.

What you’ll bring

• You’ve owned backend services from design through production and continued development.
• You’ve made API and data-model decisions, shipped changes to systems with active users, and handled failures and operational issues after launch—not just implemented isolated features.
• You’ve built and operated the cloud infrastructure behind your software.
• Your work has included provisioning resources, configuring deployments and monitoring, and diagnosing production problems across application code and infrastructure.
• You’ve led projects that other engineers contributed to while writing code yourself.
• You’ve clarified requirements, worked through design decisions and dependencies, and followed through on delivery. Teammates have trusted you to guide work without escalating every decision.
• You’ve worked across different kinds of backend problems.
• You can point to times you took responsibility outside your usual area, learned what you needed, and delivered. You’re comfortable moving between new capabilities, integrations, and operational improvements as priorities change.
• You make technical decisions with the people affected by them.
• You’ve worked with engineers and product partners to compare approaches, choose what to build now, and decide what to defer. You can explain the trade-offs and how other people’s input changed the outcome.
• You’re ready to build in Rust.
• Production Rust experience is a strong advantage, but it isn’t required. If Rust is new to you, you should be able to describe how you’ve learned an unfamiliar language or codebase and shipped production work in it.
• Your career should be centered on building software. You might have owned both the backend and infrastructure at a small SaaS company, or combined application engineering with time in platform, DevOps, or reliability roles. We care more about what you’ve built and owned than your previous titles or experience with a particular cloud provider.