Software Engineer, Developer Productivity

About Chalk

Chalk (chalk.ai http://chalk.ai) is the platform for production AI. Trusted by enterprises including Whatnot, Grindr, Mission Lane, Turo, and Apartment List, Chalk brings together context, runtime, and learning for agents and models. Chalk’s Context Engine delivers live context by querying data across warehouses, databases, streams, and APIs, straight from the source. Chalk’s runtime powers agents and models with infrastructure and governed access to LLMs and tools. Together, these capabilities help teams build AI that understands their business, continuously improves, and runs reliably in production. We've recently raised a $50 million Series A, led by Felicis. Learn more at chalk.ai http://chalk.ai.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are hiring a Software Engineer to make every other engineer at Chalk move faster. You will be responsible for building our internal developer platform, from Bazel and CI through to release automation, and the tooling engineers use locally.

Today this work is spread across the engineering team alongside everything else people are shipping. You would be the first person to own it outright, set the priorities, and build the function from here.

Our product runs inside customers' airgapped environments, meaning we need our code deployments done right the first time. Chalk's engine is C++ and Rust with a Python interface, and it is held to a demanding latency bar of 100k QPS in 5ms. That means CI has to catch performance regressions, not just correctness bugs.

We run a mix of GitHub Actions and Buildkite today and are currently consolidating on Buildkite and Bazel. Bazel and containerized dev environments are where the next gains will come from.

To be successful in this role, C++ and distributed systems experience matter most. You will also need strong communication skills to work across an engineering org. Developer Productivity specific experience is highly desirable but we're open to ramping someone up.

We're in the office 5 days a week. When unavoidable conflicts come up, we're flexible. This is not a hybrid role.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Own our Bazel build system, including toolchains, dependency management, and remote execution.
• Work across the engineering organization to create a consistent experience for engineers to run and develop Chalk in containerized dev environments.
• Establish test and benchmark patterns.
• Own CI health, which includes speed and reliability.
• Drive down test flakiness.
• Make C++ and Rust builds and tests faster through toolchain work, caching, remote execution, and dependency hygiene.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, ideally in developer productivity.
• C++ coding experience as a Software Engineer.
• Strong Distributed Systems experience.
• Ideally have hands-on Bazel experience. You have written and debugged BUILD files and Starlark, configured toolchains, and worked through either a real migration or in a large existing workspace.
• Ability to work autonomously and to make pragmatic tradeoffs with an eye towards business outcomes.
• Strong communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience. Strong experience matters more here than the credential.

BONUS POINTS

• Experience with Nix
• Experience with Buildkite
• Experience with Bazel remote execution and remote caching at scale
• Experience writing custom Bazel rules
• Experience with benchmark infrastructure for latency sensitive systems
• Experience building developer platforms used by an entire engineering org