Control Plane Engineer

Are you an experienced Rust programmer who loves building, deploying, and debugging distributed systems? We are seeking software engineers to work on the Oxide control plane, the spinal column of our software that is responsible for managing and provisioning virtual machines, storage and networking.

As a software engineer working on the control plane, you will:

• Work on a robust distributed system, Omicron, that ships across an air gap to Oxide customers running racks in their own datacenters.

• Write code mostly in Rust, read code primarily written in Rust with some C. The code you write will be open source, be it in Omicron itself or the many components with which it interacts, e.g. our block storage service (Crucible), our hypervisor (Propolis), our host operating system (Helios), our embedded operating system (Hubris), or another of our many software components.

• Collaborate with other engaged, friendly, systems-oriented engineers to understand customer use cases and implement the core of the Oxide platform.

• Work to understand and improve the performance of the services offered by the Oxide rack.

• Develop tools to test and analyze complex systems, including those deployed in production at customer sites. Logging, tracing, and metrics are critical pieces of distributed systems, and you’ll get the chance to dig into them all.

You will thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience shipping software written in Rust

• Have experience working on distributed systems

• Are energized by the thought of diving deep on neglected (but essential!) distributed systems topics like cluster attestation or live system software update

• Believe in fully documenting your ideas for both current colleagues and your own future self

• Enjoy reading excellent documentation produced by others

• Make the tools you wish you had

Before applying for this role, you should:

• Browse our public Requests for Discussion to get a flavor for how we work

• Listen to Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz to familiarize yourself with the Oxide hiring process.

• Watch Update on Update to understand the challenge of systems software in the large.

• Prowl around the code in Omicron

• Listen to some of our episodes of Oxide and Friends. A few recommendations:

• The Saga of Sagas on how we implement workflow management in the control plane

• A Crate is Born on how we think about software modularity and reuse

• The Frontend of the Computer on our API-driven approach in the control plane

• Get You a State Machine for Great Good on how we use property-based testing

• Querying Metrics with OxQL on why we developed our own query language for the control plane

• Debugger-Driven Development on how we have developed our Omicron debugger (omdb) in parallel with Omicron itself

Life at Oxide We are very explicit about our values, and they can be seen in daily life at Oxide, for example:

• Our rigor means we enjoy and take pride in the craft of engineering.

• Our urgency means that we are not above the judicious short-cut.

• Our versatility is reflected in our greatest strength: the breadth of our team.

• Our transparency can be seen in our consensus-driven RFD process.

• Our responsibility means that we both lead and follow: we have our own domains, but we also help others on their parts.

• Our curiosity shows in our insatiable desire to learn – and our empathy in our love of teaching others.

• Our humor is a big part of our daily lives: we are inveterate wise-crackers whose video meetings spill into simultaneous text chat.

Apply here