Distributed Systems Rust Engineer

About Zed Industries:

Zed Industries is a cutting-edge software company dedicated to revolutionizing the developer experience. Founded by a team of passionate developers, Zed builds a next-generation code editor that is engineered from scratch in Rust to be fast, elegant, and collaborative. Their flagship product, Zed, is a code editor that integrates advanced AI capabilities, enabling developers to write, transform, and analyze code with unprecedented efficiency.

About The Role:

We're seeking a Distributed Systems Rust Engineer to own and maintain our server-side infrastructure. You'll design and implement reliable, high-performant backend systems in Rust, building on Zed's existing deterministic test execution environment to allow us to make large changes with confidence. This role is critical in rebuilding our backend from a single stateful server to a fully distributed system, ensuring Zed's core features like AI connections, collaboration primitives, auth, billing, and telemetry run smoothly at scale.

Key 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

Required Skills and Ideal Candidate:
- 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

Bonus 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

Join us in rebuilding Zed's backend infrastructure and shaping the future of distributed systems in developer tools. Your expertise will directly impact the scalability and reliability of Zed's core features, supporting thousands of developers worldwide.