Staff Product Engineer

The short version

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 the product those customers actually see, touch, and pay for.

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

What the job actually is

You own large slices of the system, end to end. Not "contribute to." Own: you pick the approach, you ship it, you operate it, you answer for it.

Beads Team Server. The shared work graph, and the human-facing operating surface around it. A team system: one store, many agents and humans writing concurrently; project and identity boundaries; agent and API access; provisioning; and a view that makes the state legible — what is running, what is blocked, what merged, what changed, and what it cost.

Hosted Gas City. Now do the same for agent orchestration: what's running, what's stuck, and how to get more out of each token.

The open-source queue. We are stewards of the OSS repos, and we intend our commercial products to be built on top of the community's work rather than beside it. You'll be a maintainer, representing the needs of the community and the compatibility of those needs with our roadmap.

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.

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

This is mostly Go, but the job is bigger than a language. You should be comfortable designing and debugging systems where state, concurrency, and failure matter: transactions and migrations, idempotency, retries and fencing, reconciliation loops, process and session lifecycle, and observability. You should be willing to operate what you ship.

There are two natural ways into the work. You might come from the Beads side — storage engines, SQL, Dolt, backups, API contracts. Or from the Gas City side — Kubernetes, controllers, runtimes, scheduling, SRE. You do not need to arrive with both backgrounds, but you do need to be curious about the other half and able to cross the boundary.

The current terrain includes Go, Dolt and SQLite, Kubernetes, gRPC and protobuf, S3/GCS-style object storage, Docker, and Linux process tooling. There is also Rust and TypeScript/React around the wider product.

You do not need every item on that list, and we are not hiring for keyword coverage. Deep experience in one of the storage, runtime, or reliability areas is enough if you can follow a problem through code, tests, review, and production. A particular cloud vendor and Rust are useful but not prerequisites.

We use coding agents heavily. That is a plus, not a substitute for judgment: we care whether you can verify what an agent produced, find the edge it missed, and say clearly what remains uncertain.

Who we picture

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

Strong in Go. You don't need to be a TypeScript specialist, but you need enough architectural experience to know what the stack should look like — and enough product taste to make a control plane feel obvious instead of merely complete.

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 two weeks] 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.