Ergon is in stealth, so this posting describes the shape of the work rather than the thing being built. That is not coyness for its own sake: on the first call we tell you exactly what it is, including the part of it you would own, before you spend any real time on us.
This is the role closest to the centre of what we are building, and it is not currently owned by anyone. The work is a process that runs for a long time, branches, calls out to things that are slow and occasionally wrong, and has to hold a coherent picture of its own state the whole way through. If that layer is not trustworthy, nothing built on top of it can be.
What you will do
- Design and build the runtime: sequencing, state, time and cost budgets, and the conditions under which work stops
- Make the whole thing durable, so a process that dies halfway through resumes rather than starts over
- Design the model before writing the code that implements it, and write down why it is shaped that way
- Own observability for a system whose failures are usually quiet rather than loud
- Raise the engineering standards while there are few enough of us that they stick
What we are looking for
- Deep experience with long-running, stateful, failure-prone distributed systems
- You have designed something other engineers then had to build against, and it held up
- A habit of asking what happens on the unhappy path before building the happy one
- Comfort being the only person on a hard problem for weeks at a time
- You write clearly. Half of this job is making the design legible to everyone else.
Useful, not required
- Workflow engines, job schedulers, or durable execution frameworks
- Running LLM-backed systems in production, with the cost and latency budgets that implies
- You have been early at a company before and know what that actually costs
How we hire
- 01A 45-minute call with the CTO. We tell you what we are building, in full.
- 02A design session on a real problem from our backlog. You lead it and we push back. No whiteboard algorithms.
- 03A page of writing afterwards: the design you would commit to, and what you traded away to get it.
- 04A conversation with the CEO about what you want the next few years to look like.
- 05References, then an offer.
Ergon is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to any characteristic protected by law.
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