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Chalk is a data platform for machine learning applications, recently raised $50M Series A led by Felicis. The company combines Rust-speed performance with developer-friendly tools, serving leading companies in fraud prevention, identity verification, and clean energy optimization.
You will be Chalk's first dedicated software engineer focused on developer productivity. This is a high-impact individual contributor role where you will own the developer experience across the entire engineering organization. Your work will directly affect every engineer at Chalk.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning and evolving the Bazel build system, including toolchains, dependency management, and remote execution infrastructure
- Leading the consolidation from GitHub Actions to Buildkite and Bazel
- Designing and implementing containerized development environments for consistent engineer experience
- Establishing test and benchmark patterns that meet Chalk's demanding latency requirements (100k QPS in 5ms)
- Improving CI health through speed, reliability, and completion metrics
- Reducing test flakiness and optimizing C++ and Rust build times through toolchain work, caching, and dependency hygiene
Required qualifications:
- 5+ years professional software engineering experience, ideally in developer productivity or build systems
- Hands-on Bazel expertise: writing and debugging BUILD files, Starlark scripting, toolchain configuration, and experience with large-scale migrations or workspaces
- Strong C++ coding experience
- Ability to work autonomously, make pragmatic tradeoffs aligned with business outcomes, and communicate effectively
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience
Bonus experience includes Nix, Buildkite, Bazel remote execution/caching at scale, custom Bazel rules, benchmark infrastructure for latency-sensitive systems, and building developer platforms for large engineering organizations.
This is a full-time, in-office role (5 days/week) with flexibility for unavoidable conflicts. You will work closely with Chalk's engineering leadership and have autonomy to set priorities and build this function from the ground up.
