PL (Compiler) Engineer

Grit is on a mission to crush technical debt.

We believe that a big challenge in the next decade will be crumbling digital infrastructure. Our entire modern economy runs on code, but we haven’t developed appropriate tools to ensure software remains reliable over time.

Companies know that technical debt threatens the reliability of their services and slows down the pace of innovation, but struggle to find enough engineering talent to fix issues—most software maintenance today is still done manually and delayed as long as possible.

We believe there is a better way: we’re building AI bots that automatically maintain software through a combination of static analysis, our own query language, and machine learning.

Founders Fund and Abstract Ventures led our $7M seed round and we have many paying customers on our beta product. Our team is currently 5 engineers.

As an early engineer, you will have a huge impact on the engineering decisions that set us up for the future. You’ll work directly with Morgante on designing and developing the GritQL language toolchain in Rust.

This involves solving problems at the intersection of language design, static analysis, machine learning, and developer experience. If you like doing the hard work to build a magical developer experience and are equally excited by research papers and products, this role is for you.

• Design new language features to support novel GritQL queries customers want to run and integrate them into our tree-sitter grammar.
• Update the GritQL compiler (written in Rust) to efficiently rewrite ASTs across million+ line repos.
• Integrate new static analysis tools into the Grit data layer to allow hybrid queries across multiple data sources.
• Improve error handling and constraint solving when synthesizing programs using large language models.
• Thoughtfully suggest new architectural solutions and the introduction of appropriate technologies for scaling towards our public launch.

• 4+ years experience as a software developer
• Experience with Rust preferred, but not required.
• Execution-driven mindset: you love shipping.
• Previous experience building internal engineering tools or developer products is a plus.
• Interest in programming languages (ex. compilers) or machine learning is a plus, but not required. You’ll learn more on the job!
• Comfortable working in low-structure environments and navigating unknown unknowns.

• Build a meaningful product to solve a tangible problem for companies.
• Ownership in all senses of the word: significant equity upside, direct impact on product vision, and contact with users.
• Solve your own problems. We dogfood our own product and you can build the ideal developer experience as you work.
• You’ll learn new techniques on the cutting edge of research in programming languages and machine learning.
• Work with a talented team from Google and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
• We have a long runway and can offer a competitive base salary (up to $250k).

We believe that the most impactful work is done through high bandwidth in-person collaboration, particularly at an early-stage company. Most of the team works from our NYC office, near Union Square. Exceptions are possible for candidates with a demonstrated track record in related fields.

If this role sounds interesting to you, apply below.

Even if you’re not quite sure, we encourage you to apply anyway.