Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

We build the open-source stack teams use to run coding agents at scale. Three repos under github.com/gastownhall: beads, the work graph that agents and humans share (~26k stars); gastown (~17k); and gascity, agent orchestration. We're taking Beads and Gas City to the cloud. The commercial side is Gasworks: the hosted control plane teams use to run agent fleets without babysitting them. If you know our open-source stack, imagine that as the agentic platform for a team or an organization.

Over the last six months we’ve talked to customers, held workshops, and started design partnerships. Now we're scaling the team and the product toward revenue. You are one of our first engineering hires, and you own whether those customers succeed: getting Gasworks running on their real work, and making sure what we build is what they actually need.

This is an engineering role with a customer bias, not a sales role. No quota, no pipeline. You write code, and you're the person our customers call.

(We're also hiring a full-stack Founding Engineer — more product-oriented — and a Founding Platform Engineer — more infrastructure-oriented. Exceptional candidates have experience across all of these areas.)

What the job actually is

You own customer outcomes, end to end. Not "support." Own: you understand the workflow, you get the product running on it, you fix what's in the way, and you answer for whether it worked.

Design partners to production. Sit with our design partners and early customers, understand how their teams actually work, and get Gasworks running on real work in their environment — their repos, their CI, their cloud, their identity provider. Then keep it running until they'd miss it.

The loop back into the product. Everything customers hit becomes a spec, an issue, or a PR — many of them yours. You are the voice of the customer in our design docs, and you carry the fix all the way to main. When the roadmap and a customer disagree, you have the context to say which one is right.

The repeatable path. Turn the first deployments into a playbook the next ten customers can follow: onboarding, reference configurations, integrations with the tools companies already use, and docs that answer the question before it's asked. Most of your day is engineering; the output is customers who don't need you anymore.

We are a small, flat organization. You work 1:1 with me (Julian, CTO) and with everyone else at the company. We all wear multiple hats and push toward the same goal.

Your first 90 days

Our first few customers running Gasworks in production on real work — not a pilot — with a written playbook for how they got there. By day 90 you should know our customers better than anyone at the company, and it should show in the roadmap.

How we work

We run our own product on itself. Gas City factories write our design docs, implement them, review the PRs, and drive them to main. Nobody here cares whether a line was typed by you or by an agent — we care about building the processes and frameworks that get us as much leverage as possible while maintaining quality. We learn what works and what doesn't, and we build those learnings back into the product. We are factory operators, and the goal is to improve the efficiency of our factory every day.

The technical shape

Mostly Go, and you'll ship in it. You don't need to be a systems specialist — that's what the platform side of the team is for — but you need to read and debug a distributed system with confidence, because you'll be doing it in a customer's environment with the customer watching. You should be comfortable in the places customers live: Kubernetes, the major clouds, CI systems, identity providers, and the glue between them.

You'll live in coding agents daily, and you'll teach customers to. We care whether you can get a factory running on someone else's codebase, verify what it produced, find the edge it missed, and explain to a skeptical engineer why it's trustworthy.

The current terrain includes Go, Dolt and SQLite, Kubernetes, gRPC and protobuf, Docker, OpenTelemetry, and GitHub Actions, with TypeScript/React around the product. You do not need every item on that list, and we are not hiring for keyword coverage.

Who we picture

Someone whose merged PRs we may have already read or visible open source contributions demonstrating your mastery as an agentic engineer.

An engineer who has been the person customers call: a forward-deployed or solutions engineer who wants to build, or a product engineer who has sat with users and shipped what they learned. Comfortable in ambiguous, live situations — a customer's broken pipeline on a Friday afternoon, a room of engineers who haven't decided whether to trust agents yet. You write clearly, because half of this job is turning a conversation into a spec. You have opinions about product.

You use agents with real leverage, and you can show your verification habits, not just your throughput.

If you've shipped to Beads, Gas Town, or Gas City: mention it and skip the rest of the pitch. That work is the interview's first round, already done.

Compensation and practicalities

• Salary. $180,000–$240,000, depending on experience and expertise.

• Equity. A founding-engineer grant for a pre-seed company. Standard four-year vesting with a one-year clif.

• Benefits. Medical, dental, and vision — 100% of premiums covered for you and 50% for your dependents. 401(k) starting Jan 1, 2027. Standard tech PTO plus company holidays. Home-office and equipment budget. Annual learning and conference budget.

• Location. Full-time and remote, with solid overlap with US Pacific Time. Some travel to customers. Eligibility details are under Additional information below.

The interview loop

No leetcode. Three steps, about a week end to end:

1. A real conversation about your work, with me. [60 minutes]

2. A practical session — you use real agents to fix real bugs or build real features in our codebase. [90 minutes]

3. A final 1:1 with our CEO, Chris Sells. [45 minutes]

Additional information

Where you work. This is a full-time, remote position for candidates living in any State and the District of Columbia. We only hire in regions where we're fully set up to follow local employment law. You'll need solid overlap with US Pacific Time. Open to non-US applicants for exceptional candidates.

Work authorization. You must be authorized to work in the United States. We do not offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Timeline. We're accepting applications until September 18th, 2026. We'll update this posting if that changes.

Equal opportunity. Gas City is an equal-opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We have zero tolerance for harassment or retaliation.

Accommodations. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any stage of the hiring process, or to perform the job, email julian@gascity.com and we'll arrange it.

Background checks. If we need a background check, we'll get your authorization first and follow all fair-chance requirements.

Your privacy. We handle your data strictly for recruiting. See our Applicant Privacy Notice.

This posting is for information only and isn't a contract. Any offer will come in a separate written agreement. Benefit specifics are governed by the formal plan documents and applicable law.