R-14 · CONTINUUM
LIVEFounding Graph Systems Engineer, Continuum
Work is a graph. Storing it as one is easy. Recomputing consequence across it the instant anything moves is not.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£220,000 to £380,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.55% to 1.20% of Continuum
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Continuum's whole argument is that the critical path and the blast radius of a slip are computed rather than debated. That is a claim about latency as much as about data structure: the moment somebody drags a node, every downstream consequence has to be true again, at ten thousand nodes, without a recalculation that takes a coffee break.
You would own the graph engine: the representation, incremental recomputation, cycle and conflict handling, versioning and history, and the concurrency model that lets several people and several agents mutate one graph without producing a state nobody intended. It is the substrate everything else in this venture stands on.
More on the company itself: Continuum →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Week one you get a synthetic graph ten times the size of our largest real customer and an instruction to find where it falls over. It will. Your write-up of what broke first is more useful to us than anything you could ship in the same fortnight.
A normal Tuesday: incremental recomputation in a long block, then a conversation with whoever owns the canvas about which operations have to feel instant and which merely have to be fast, then something about conflict resolution, because agents mutate this graph too and they do not wait their turn.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
TypeScript is the house language and Postgres is the store, with recursive queries doing more work than you might expect. Where that runs out, something compiled. The interesting part of this role is the algorithms rather than the runtime.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The representation
How a DAG of real work is stored so consequence is cheap to ask for.
02
Incremental recompute
Everything downstream true again the moment anything moves.
03
Concurrency
Several people and several agents mutating one graph, deterministically.
04
History
Versioning, so that what changed and what it cost is answerable later.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have built something where a non-trivial data structure was the product rather than an implementation detail
- ▸Comfort with graph algorithms and with incremental or streaming computation
- ▸You reason about concurrency properly, and can describe a race you shipped and then fixed
- ▸Strong in a typed language, TypeScript or otherwise
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Build systems, spreadsheet engines, dependency resolvers, CRDTs or query planners. All the same shape as this
- ▸You have made an interactive system fast at a scale where the naive approach died
- ▸Operational transforms or conflict-free replication for collaborative editing
- ▸An interest in project management as a domain, which is rarer than it sounds
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£220,000 to £380,000 base, plus 0.55% to 1.20% of Continuum, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.