Software Engineer

About us

At Dagster Labs, our mission is simple but ambitious: to empower every organization to build a productive, scalable data platform. We’re the brains behind Dagster, the open-source tool developers love, and Dagster+, our managed cloud. From scrappy startups to global enterprises, thousands of teams trust us to power the data behind their analytics, machine learning, and AI breakthroughs.

We believe the AI era runs on reliable, high-quality data. That’s why we make data platforms easier to test, easier to understand, and actually enjoyable to use. Dagster is quickly becoming the backbone of how the world builds intelligent systems.

We’re a small, well-funded team with big energy and a track record of shipping software people rave about. We aim high and work as a team, holding ourselves to the highest standards and trusting eachother to deliver. We care about how we work together: no egos, no drama, just a lot of curiosity and a drive to make something meaningful.

If you want to help shape the future of data and AI and have fun doing it, come build with us.

About the role

Are you a driven software engineer who thrives at the intersection of product development, customer success, and user adoption? Join the Dagster Labs engineering team, where you'll contribute to building and enhancing the Dagster platform, empowering organizations to create scalable and productive data platforms. This is your chance to make a direct impact by solving real-world problems and delivering meaningful solutions for our users and customers.

This is a full-time, competitively paid position with benefits, based out of our San Francisco office. You’ll be part of a highly collaborative, in-person team that works closely together to design, build, and ship high-impact features. Our office provides everything you need to be productive and comfortable, with dedicated space for heads-down focus, whiteboarding, and spontaneous collaboration. While this role is primarily onsite, we support a flexible weekly schedule.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the core Dagster framework by designing, implementing, and maintaining foundational features that power data orchestration at scale.
• Enhance the open source developer experience through improved documentation, tooling, and workflows that help contributors and users be productive from day one.
• Build and extend Components to enable modular, reusable patterns for data platform development.
• Evolve the core API including features such as freshness policies, declarative automation, sensors, schedules, Ops & Jobs, configuration, resources, and legacy functionality.
• Drive AI-driven innovation by exploring and implementing scaffolding and automation tools in the open source ecosystem.
• Improve local development and testing workflows to make it faster, easier, and more reliable for developers to build, run, and validate their Dagster projects.

Must-have Qualifications

• 3+ years of relevant software development experience
• Proficiency in Python or a similar high-level programming language, and working familiarity with frontend development.
• Expertise across the full software development lifecycle, from planning to delivery and iteration
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Proven effectiveness at contributing to and executing as part of a team
• Interest in working at a fast-moving, dynamic startup environment

Nice-to-have Qualifications

• Experience with Dagster or related data orchestrators.
• Experience with data engineering, MLOps, or AI pipelines (e.g. ETL tools, Spark, MLflow, Hugging Face, etc).
• Experience with data platforms, infrastructure as code, and Docker-based deployment patterns.
• Experience with growth-oriented engineering initiatives.
• Experience in a high-functioning engineering organization working on large-scale distributed systems or B2B SaaS applications.
• Passion for engaging directly with users for research and support.

Our Stack

Dagster is built in Python and TypeScript, and runs seamlessly across macOS, Linux, and Windows. Our frontend is powered by React and GraphQL, delivering a modern, intuitive developer experience. We value engineers who are comfortable working across the stack and making thoughtful contributions.

You belong here

We are committed to building an inclusive team and an open-source community where no one feels out of place. We know that teams with diverse backgrounds state their assumptions more explicitly, think more rigorously, and build better software. Plus it's more fun and interesting to work with a wide variety of perspectives.

You should apply to work at Dagster Labs if you want to work in, and help to build and strengthen, a high-performing software development environment where people of all backgrounds are welcome.

The estimated cash salary for this role is $165,000-$210,000.

Other resources:

• The launch of Dagster blog post
• Launching Dagster Cloud to GA blog post
• The Data Engineering Impedance Mismatch blogpost/presentation
• What Dagster Believes About Data Platforms
• Software-Defined Assets blog post, Data Council talk, and animated explainer
• The April 2024 Dagster+ launch event

No recruiters please.