Zed Backend Engineer, Cloud at Zed to build and lead the development of cloud services powering core features including AI connections and collaboration. Help transition backend from a single server to a fully distributed system.
Responsibilities
Building Cloud Runners that provide ephemeral compute for development work.
Evolving billing to support new products, pricing, and packaging.
Integrating with identity providers and developing authorization capabilities.
Building integrations that connect Zed and Delta to developers’ existing workflows.
Turn emerging needs into shipped capabilities. Work with engineering and product partners to clarify problems, choose a practical scope, and carry projects through implementation, rollout, and operation.
Share technical stewardship of the cloud system. Develop the context and judgment to make consequential decisions, guide work, and become someone teammates can turn to without routing every question through the same person.
Stay hands-on. Write and review code, investigate difficult bugs, and work through the details that make a service correct, maintainable, and reliable.
Make deliberate trade-offs. Recognize when a focused solution is enough, when an investment will make future work easier, and when to leave something alone.
Qualification
Help others work independentlyOwn production behaviorYou’re ready to build in Rust
Required
Help others work independently. Share context, give useful feedback, and improve the tests, interfaces, and documentation that support the team’s work.
Own production behavior. Participate in on-call, respond to incidents, and address recurring problems in the software and infrastructure.
You’ve owned backend services from design through production and continued development. You’ve made API and data-model decisions, shipped changes to systems with active users, and handled failures and operational issues after launch—not just implemented isolated features.
You’ve built and operated the cloud infrastructure behind your software. Your work has included provisioning resources, configuring deployments and monitoring, and diagnosing production problems across application code and infrastructure.
You’ve led projects that other engineers contributed to while writing code yourself. You’ve clarified requirements, worked through design decisions and dependencies, and followed through on delivery. Teammates have trusted you to guide work without escalating every decision.
You’ve worked across different kinds of backend problems. You can point to times you took responsibility outside your usual area, learned what you needed, and delivered. You’re comfortable moving between new capabilities, integrations, and operational improvements as priorities change.
You make technical decisions with the people affected by them. You’ve worked with engineers and product partners to compare approaches, choose what to build now, and decide what to defer. You can explain the trade-offs and how other people’s input changed the outcome.
You’re ready to build in Rust. Production Rust experience is a strong advantage, but it isn’t required. If Rust is new to you, you should be able to describe how you’ve learned an unfamiliar language or codebase and shipped production work in it.
