Software Engineer (Data Catalog & Observability Products)

About us

Dagster’s mission is to empower every organization to build a productive, scalable data platform. We’re an early stage, well-funded startup team with a proven track record of shipping open source software with global adoption. We put a premium on respectful, clear, and complete communication, and we expect each other to be creative, curious, effective, and empathetic.

We believe deeply that the right tools and abstractions enable not just technological transformation, but also organizational transformation. We strive to put the user and their hard work at the center of our decision making. In practice, that means we are looking for engineers who want to write clean APIs and helpful error messages, and who always try to understand user needs when designing a new system.

All of our open source work is done publicly. You can gain context about how we collaborate as a team and the problems we work on by exploring GitHub and looking at our code reviews.

About the role

We’re looking for a product-minded software engineer to join the team working on Dagster+, our hosted SaaS product, to help make Dagster the de facto cloud solution for organizations to build, manage, and leverage their data assets. In this role, you will drive improvements to Dagster’s backend system, underlying open source framework, and product UI to unlock new capabilities for our users. You will solve difficult technical problems throughout the software stack and work collaboratively with the rest of the team to plan and execute. You will instrument, monitor, debug, and optimize distributed systems from end to end. You’ll talk directly to our users (data engineers and platform owners) to understand how best to improve our product.

This is a full-time, competitively paid position with benefits. We are a distributed team with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis. We have team members all over the U.S. and we are hiring fully remote candidates in the U.S. Every employee is provided a remote work stipend to cover the cost of home office equipment and anything else that makes your remote work location comfortable, productive, or successful. And if you’d rather not work from home, we’ll cover the cost of a coworking or office space if you’re fully remote.

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute product development initiatives from prototype to user adoption, in collaboration with product and design and your peers in engineering
• Participate in technical architecture discussions and help the team make key technical decisions.
• Solve difficult technical problems throughout the software stack and get projects over the finish line, across front-end, back-end, or infrastructure.
• Proactively identify and address opportunities for enhancement—be it in code quality, user experience, or overall performance—and lead initiatives to make these improvements happen.

Must-have Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant software development experience
• Fluency in Python or a similar high-level programming language, and proficiency with frontend development (we use React)
• Expertise across the full software development lifecycle, from planning to delivery and iteration
• Experience in a high-functioning engineering organization working on B2B SaaS applications or large-scale distributed systems
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Proven effectiveness at contributing to and executing as part of a team

Nice-to-have Qualifications

• Interest in progressing into a tech lead role, and relevant experience
• Experience building services on Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes & Postgres
• Experience with Dagster or related data orchestrators.
• Experience with using or supporting tools in the Modern Data Stack
• Experience engaging directly with users for research and support.

You belong here

We are committed to building an inclusive team and an open-source community where no one feels out of place. We know that teams with diverse backgrounds state their assumptions more explicitly, think more rigorously, and build better software. Plus it's more fun and interesting to work with a wide variety of perspectives.

You should apply to work at Dagster Labs if you want to work in, and help to build and strengthen, a high-performing software development environment where people of all backgrounds are welcome.

Our Stack

Dagster is built in Python and TypeScript to work on macOS, Posix, and Windows. We use React and GraphQL to develop beautiful frontend tooling. We integrate with a wide range of databases, data warehouses, orchestration engines, compute substrates, and cloud services. Candidates should be comfortable make incremental changes in the React codebase, though most day‑to‑day work will be in Python.

The estimated cash salary for this role is $190,000 - $220,000.

Other resources

• The launch of Dagster blog post
• Launching Dagster Cloud to GA blog post
• The Data Engineering Impedance Mismatch blogpost/presentation
• Our latest major release - Dagster 1.10
• Software-Defined Assets blog post, Data Council talk, and animated explainer
• Our latest episode on the Data Engineering Podcast
• Our philosophy on code reviews

No recruiters please.