Software Engineer - Core (Onsite)

About us

We’re an early stage, well-funded startup team with a proven track record of shipping open source software with global adoption. We put a premium on respectful, clear, and complete communication, and we expect each other to be creative, curious, effective, and empathetic.

We believe deeply that the right tools and abstractions enable not just technological transformation, but also organizational transformation. We strive to put the user and their hard work at the center of our decision making. In practice, that means we are looking for engineers who want to write clean APIs and helpful error messages, and who always try to understand user needs when designing a new system.

All of our open source work is done publicly. You can gain context about how we collaborate as a team and the problems we work on by exploring GitHub and looking at our code reviews .

About the role

Are you a driven software engineer who thrives at the intersection of product development, customer success, and user adoption? Join the Dagster Labs engineering team, where you'll contribute to building and enhancing the Dagster platform, empowering organizations to create scalable and productive data platforms. This is your chance to make a direct impact by solving real-world problems and delivering meaningful solutions for our users and customers.

This is a full-time, competitively paid position with benefits, based out of our San Francisco office. You’ll be part of a highly collaborative, in-person team that works closely together to design, build, and ship high-impact features. Our office provides everything you need to be productive and comfortable, with dedicated space for heads-down focus, whiteboarding, and spontaneous collaboration. While this role is primarily onsite, we support a flexible weekly schedule.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the core Dagster framework by designing, implementing, and maintaining foundational features that power data orchestration at scale.


• Enhance the open source developer experience through improved documentation, tooling, and workflows that help contributors and users be productive from day one.


• Build and extend Components to enable modular, reusable patterns for data platform development.


• Evolve the core API including features such as freshness policies, declarative automation, sensors, schedules, Ops & Jobs, configuration, resources, and legacy functionality.


• Drive AI-driven innovation by exploring and implementing scaffolding and automation tools in the open source ecosystem.


• Improve local development and testing workflows to make it faster, easier, and more reliable for developers to build, run, and validate their Dagster projects.

Must-have Qualifications

• Relevant degree in a Computer Science related field OR 3+ years of relevant software development experience


• Proficiency in Python or a similar high-level programming language, and working familiarity with frontend development.


• Expertise across the full software development lifecycle, from planning to delivery and iteration


• Strong written and oral communication skills


• Proven effectiveness at contributing to and executing as part of a team

Nice-to-have Qualifications

• Experience with Dagster or related data orchestrators.


• Experience with data engineering, MLOps, or AI pipelines (e.g. ETL tools, Spark, MLflow, Hugging Face, etc).


• Experience with data platforms, infrastructure as code, and Docker-based deployment patterns.


• Experience with growth-oriented engineering initiatives.


• Experience in a high-functioning engineering organization working on large-scale distributed systems or B2B SaaS applications.


• Passion for engaging directly with users for research and support.

You belong here

We are committed to building an inclusive team and an open-source community where no one feels out of place. We know that teams with diverse backgrounds state their assumptions more explicitly, think more rigorously, and build better software. Plus it's more fun and interesting to work with a wide variety of perspectives.

You should apply to work at Dagster Labs if you want to work in, and help to build and strengthen, a high-performing software development environment where people of all backgrounds are welcome.

Our Stack

Dagster is built in Python and TypeScript to work on macOS, Posix, and Windows. We use GraphQL, Apollo, and React to develop beautiful frontend tooling. We integrate with a wide range of databases, data warehouses, orchestration engines, compute substrates, and cloud services. Candidates should be comfortable making incremental changes in this React codebase, though most day‑to‑day work will be in Python.

The estimated cash salary for this role is $145,000-$170,000.

Other resources:

• The launch of Dagster blog post


• Launching Dagster Cloud to GA blog post
• Software-Defined Assets blog post , Data Council talk , and animated explainer

No recruiters please.