Backend Rust Engineer

Zed is a fast, collaborative code editor built from the ground up in Rust. We’re seeking a Backend Engineer with a strong Rust background to own and maintain our server-side infrastructure.
The server-side infrastructure powers many of Zed’s core features: all AI connections go through this system, as do the collaboration primitives, in addition to cross-cutting concerns like auth, billing and telemetry. We are currently rebuilding our backend from a single stateful server to a fully distributed system, and looking for someone to help lead this effort.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement reliable, high-performant backend systems in Rust

• Build on Zed’s existing deterministic test execution environment to allow us to make large changes with confidence

• Contribute to architectural decisions that shape Zed’s future

• Solve complex product challenges, drawing on your systems programming background when needed

• Collaborate with designers and engineers to create intuitive user interfaces

• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code

• Participate in code reviews and collaborate with teammates and community members in real time

• Help improve our development processes and tooling

• Optimize performance and user experience where necessary

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Rust

• Experience deploying and maintaining distributed systems in production

• Solid understanding of algorithms and data structures

• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills

• Strong product sense and user-centric design approach

• Self-directed work ethic and ability to operate autonomously

• Excellent communication skills for remote collaboration

• Willingness to work on both backend and frontend aspects of the application

• Enthusiasm for pair programming, including several hours weekly in Zed

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Cloudflare’s worker infrastructure

• Knowledge of database performance characteristics, particularly PostgreSQL and SQLite

• Familiarity with tracing, logging and telemetry tools like Axiom or Honeycomb

• Background in building real-time collaborative systems

• Knowledge of cross-platform development challenges

• Experience working on product code, front-end, or full-stack development