Engineering · Berlin or Remote (EU/US) · Open
Senior Software Engineer, Runtime
Join the four-person runtime team building the orchestration core that 250+ customers depend on in production. Distributed systems, real reliability work, real on-call.
About the role
The runtime is the heart of Hatch — it's the layer that queues, retries, versions, and observes every workflow our customers run. Today it's a Rust workspace running on a mid-size Kubernetes cluster across two regions; we're building toward a four-region active-active setup over the next 18 months.
The team is four engineers including Sara (staff, runtime lead) and Aaron (CTO, still in the code daily). The role is the fifth. You'd own one of three slices: scheduler internals, multi-tenant isolation, or the observability layer — chosen with you based on what's pulling at you.
This is a senior IC role. We aren't hiring a manager. We are hiring someone who reads systems papers, writes design docs, owns on-call, and reviews other people's pull requests with the assumption that the person on the other end will be a colleague for the next ten years.
What you'll do
• Own one of the three runtime slices (scheduler, isolation, observability) end-to-end. You'll inherit a working surface and a backlog; the first month is mostly reading and writing, not shipping.
• Drive the multi-region active-active migration over the next 12 months. We have a design doc and a strategy; you'll own the execution.
• Take part in the on-call rotation — five-person rotation, one week each month, real pages but rare.
• Mentor the next two engineers we hire onto the runtime team. We do real code reviews, real design-doc reviews, and we expect senior engineers to set the technical standard for the team.
• Contribute to the open-source SDKs (Rust, TypeScript, Python). The runtime is closed; the SDKs are not.
Who you are
• Seven-plus years building distributed systems, ideally in Rust or Go. We're a Rust shop on the runtime; we'll teach you if you've shipped serious distributed work in another language.
• You've built or operated a production system with strong consistency or hard reliability guarantees. Bonus if it was customer-facing and you owned on-call.
• Strong writer. We do design docs before code. Your last three projects should have decision documents — if not written, then articulable.
• Pragmatic about trade-offs. The runtime is opinionated; we're not building it to be a general-purpose orchestrator. You can hold the goal in mind.
• EU- or US-timezone-friendly (we have a four-hour overlap across the team).
About Hatch
Hatch is the workflow runtime for AI-native products. We're a 32-person team across Brooklyn and Berlin, $42M Series A (Accel + Khosla), and 250+ customers running production workloads on us today. Founded in 2024 by Mei Tanaka (ex-design lead at Notion) and Aaron Park (ex-infra at Stripe and Modal).
Our customers ship AI agents, copilots, and autonomous workflows. We solve the boring problems underneath them: queueing, retries, versioning, observability, rollback. The product is opinionated, the docs are honest, and the bills don't surprise you. We're remote-OK with hubs in two cities, comp is transparent, and we hire slow on purpose — the team you'd join all read the runtime end-to-end in their first two weeks.
APPLY FOR THIS ROLE
Apply for Senior Software Engineer, Runtime.
We read every application. You'll hear from us within five business days — yes or not-this-time, never silence.
Prefer email? Send your application to hello@hatch.example with the role title in the subject.