R-24 · SCALEY
LIVEFounding Build Systems Engineer, Scaley
Push to deploy is a promise about the slowest part of somebody's day, and most of that time is the build.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£220,000 to £370,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.50% to 1.10% of Scaley
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Between a git push and a running deployment sits the part everybody tolerates and nobody enjoys: dependency resolution, caching, reproducibility, and a container image that is either three hundred megabytes or three gigabytes depending on decisions nobody made deliberately. Scaley promises the developer experience of the last decade on any substrate, and the build is where that promise most often breaks.
You would own it end to end: build detection for whatever a customer pushed, caching that actually hits, reproducibility good enough that the same commit produces the same artefact, and per-branch preview builds fast enough that people use them for review rather than out of duty.
More on the company itself: Scaley →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Week one you time everything. Every stage of a real build, on the group's own deployments, and produce the honest breakdown of where a developer's minutes go. We build Scaley on Scaley, so the first person whose time you save is sitting next to you.
A normal Tuesday: cache work, a language ecosystem that has done something unreasonable, and the recurring argument about how much magic is the right amount, because zero-config is a promise that has to survive somebody's genuinely strange monorepo.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Go or Rust, container build tooling, content-addressed caching, and whichever hermetic build approach earns its place. You will end up knowing more than you want to about half a dozen language ecosystems and the ways they package things.
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
Detection
Whatever was pushed, built correctly, without a configuration file.
02
Cache
Hits that are real, across branches and across customers where that is safe.
03
Reproducibility
The same commit produces the same artefact, on any substrate.
04
Preview builds
Fast enough that review happens on them rather than despite them.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have worked on build systems, CI infrastructure or container tooling as the product rather than as a chore
- ▸Comfort in a compiled language
- ▸Deep familiarity with at least two language ecosystems and the ways their packaging goes wrong
- ▸You have made something meaningfully faster and can show the measurement
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Bazel, Nix, Buildkit, or having built a hermetic build system in anger
- ▸Content-addressed storage or distributed caching
- ▸Supply chain security, provenance, or reproducible builds as a discipline
- ▸You have supported other engineers' builds and are not bitter about it
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 £370,000 base, plus 0.50% to 1.10% of Scaley, 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.