Software Engineer, Astral

About the Team

The Astral team builds high-performance developer tools to power the future of programming, at OpenAI and beyond, including Ruff, uv, and ty. The Astral toolchain sees hundreds of millions of installs per month and powers hundreds of millions of package downloads per day for the Python ecosystem. As a team, we are building on those foundations to continue solving impactful tooling problems as programming evolves.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced software engineer to build next-generation programming language tooling. If you like writing high-performance Rust, it could be a good fit; if you like thinking about the future of programming, it could also be a good fit. Strong candidates tend to have deep experience with Rust, Python, open source, compilers, or developer tools — but few candidates are deep in all of these areas, and we've hired candidates without prior Rust or Python experience.

In this role, you will:

- Design and implement features in Astral’s existing open source projects (Ruff, uv, ty, and python-build-standalone, and more).

- Support Astral’s open source projects as a maintainer, triaging user issues, reviewing pull requests, and participating in community discussions.

- Evolve the Astral toolchain to accelerate development velocity at OpenAI.

- Build entirely new tools, in entirely different programming ecosystems, to power the future of agentic software development.

Your background might look something like:

- 5+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant engineering roles.

- High agency and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment, with strong ownership of security, reliability, and operational excellence.

- Strong developer empathy and communication skills, including experience maintaining open source projects.

- Exceptional systems engineering fundamentals and a track record of leading complex projects from ambiguous problem statements through to user impact.

- Proficiency in one or more system programming languages (like Rust).