Staff Platform Engineer

The short version

We build the open-source stack teams use to run coding agents at scale. Three repos under github.com/gastownhall: beads, the work graph that agents and humans share (~26k stars); gastown (~17k); and gascity, agent orchestration. We're taking Beads and Gas City to the cloud. The commercial side is Gasworks: the hosted control plane teams use to run agent fleets without babysitting them. If you know our open-source stack, imagine that as the agentic platform for a team or an organization.

Over the last six months we’ve talked to customers, held workshops, and started design partnerships. Now we're scaling the team and the product toward revenue. You are one of our first engineering hires, and everything people will pay us for sits on top of the platform you build and own.

(We're also hiring a full-stack Founding Engineer — more product-oriented — and a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer — more customer-oriented. Exceptional candidates have experience across all of these areas.)

What the job actually is

You own large slices of the system, end to end. Not "contribute to." Own: you pick the approach, you ship it, you operate it, you answer for it.

Beads Team Server. Turning Beads from a single-player experience into a platform — one store, many people and agents hitting it at once, scaling from a single developer to teams and organizations.

Hosted Gas City. Today it lives on one machine. The job is making the same thing true when the machine is in the cloud — polecats in containers, scaling as wide as needed. New scale, new constraints, and the future of agentic development, built by you.

Enterprise table stakes. Billing, permissions, SSO — everything needed to sit side by side with the tools companies already use.

The through-line under all three is reliability. You'll define our SLOs before customers define them for us: observability, backups, and a security baseline that holds up when the first enterprise asks hard questions — and yes, being paged by your own code.

We are a small, flat organization. You work 1:1 with me (Julian, CTO) and with everyone else at the company. We all wear multiple hats and push toward the same goal.

How we work

We run our own product on itself. Gas City factories write our design docs, implement them, review the PRs, and drive them to main. Nobody here cares whether a line was typed by you or by an agent — we care about building the processes and frameworks that get us as much leverage as possible while maintaining quality. We learn what works and what doesn't, and we build those learnings back into the product. We are factory operators, and the goal is to improve the efficiency of our factory every day.

The technical shape

This is mostly Go, but the job is bigger than a language. You should be at home designing and debugging systems where state, concurrency, and failure matter: transactions and migrations, idempotency, retries and fencing, reconciliation loops, process and session lifecycle, and observability. You will operate what you ship.

The current terrain includes Go, Dolt and SQLite, Kubernetes, gRPC and protobuf, S3/GCS-style object storage, Docker, and Linux process tooling. There is also Rust and TypeScript/React around the wider product.

You do not need every item on that list, and we are not hiring for keyword coverage. Deep experience in storage, runtimes, or reliability is what matters, if you can follow a problem through code, tests, review, and production. A particular cloud vendor and Rust are useful but not prerequisites.

We use coding agents heavily. That is a plus, not a substitute for judgment: we care whether you can verify what an agent produced, find the edge it missed, and say clearly what remains uncertain.

Who we picture

Someone whose merged PRs we may have already read. Deep in Go, comfortable with distributed state and the failure modes that come with it, and unbothered by owning a system in production — you've run something real, watched it break in interesting ways, and made it boring again.

You use agents with real leverage, and you can show your verification habits, not just your throughput.

Compensation and practicalities

• Salary. $180,000–$240,000, depending on experience and expertise.

• Equity. A founding-engineer grant for a pre-seed company. Standard four-year vesting with a one-year clif.

• Benefits. Medical, dental, and vision — 100% of premiums covered for you and 50% for your dependents. 401(k) starting Jan 1, 2027. Standard tech PTO plus company holidays. Home-office and equipment budget. Annual learning and conference budget.

• Location. Full-time and remote, with solid overlap with US Pacific Time. Some travel to customers. Eligibility details are under Additional information below.

The interview loop

No leetcode. Three steps, [about two weeks] end to end:

1. A real conversation about your work, with me. [60 minutes]

2. A practical session — you use real agents to fix real bugs or build real features in our codebase. [90 minutes]

3. A final 1:1 with our CEO, Chris Sells. [45 minutes]
   

Additional information

Where you work. This is a full-time, remote position for candidates living in any State and the District of Columbia. We only hire in regions where we're fully set up to follow local employment law. You'll need solid overlap with US Pacific Time. Open to non-US applicants for exceptional candidates.

Work authorization. You must be authorized to work in the United States. We do not offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Timeline. We're accepting applications until September 18th, 2026. We'll update this posting if that changes.

Equal opportunity. Gas City is an equal-opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We have zero tolerance for harassment or retaliation.

Accommodations. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any stage of the hiring process, or to perform the job, email [email protected] and we'll arrange it.

Background checks. If we need a background check, we'll get your authorization first and follow all fair-chance requirements.

Your privacy. We handle your data strictly for recruiting. See our Applicant Privacy Notice.

This posting is for information only and isn't a contract. Any offer will come in a separate written agreement. Benefit specifics are governed by the formal plan documents and applicable law.