Description: Build the infra that empower our users to build without worrying about infra

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Compensation: $175k, 1% equity

About Val Town

Val Town is the most delightful way to get JavaScript running in the cloud. Customers use us to create everything from small automations to full-stack web apps.

Our mission is to spread the joy of programming. We believe everyone should code for the same reasons that everyone should read and write: access to the magical world it opens for you. Reliable, fast infrastructure is what makes that possible.

Under the hood, we operate a custom sandboxing platform that executes untrusted user code at scale — one of the hardest and most interesting infra problems out there.

We're a small team in Brooklyn — including Steve Krouse, Tom MacWright, Brent Jackson, Charlie Molthrop, and Pete Millspaugh — building a product that programmers love. Come join us!

Who we’re looking for

• You love understanding how systems work under the hood, and you share our passion for making programming delightful and accessible.
• You thrive at a startup. You crave responsibility, ownership, and the trust to do what needs to be done.
• You're ambitious, humble, reflective, and striving to grow. You have extremely high integrity.
• You're a true systems thinker who understands how all the pieces fit together — networking, compute, storage, orchestration.
• You bias toward simplicity and shipping incrementally, not architecting perfect systems.
• You'd rather delete code than add it, and you'd rather use a boring, proven tool than a shiny new one.
• You're a clear, thoughtful communicator.

What you’ll be doing

At Val Town, infra engineers build, operate, and evolve our running systems, most notably our own custom Functions As A Service platform. We run our own sandboxed runtime for user code, so you'll work on isolation, resource limits, cold start times, and everything that makes a FaaS platform feel fast and safe. Your job is to keep our platform running and improving so our customers can get their delightful serverless experience.

Your day-to-day will include making our runtime faster, cheaper, more scalable, and reliable. You'll help us respond to incidents, do post-mortems, and increase system observability. We need someone who can incrementally help us improve our systems as we scale – as well as help us design the next generations of our platform that actually ship. See our blog for how we think about building.

Your skills & experience