Software Engineer

About Dust

Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it.

With enterprise-grade governance, flexible model choice, and a collaborative interface for humans and agents to work together, Dust empowers AI Operators at the world’s fastest-moving companies to rewire how work gets done.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast.

We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, Vanta and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026.

Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50.

TL;DR

We are seeking a talented Software Engineer to join our team. You will be responsible for framing and building high-value features and pieces of infrastructure in this role.

As a Software Engineer, you’ll engage with technologies like Typescript, React.js, Node.js, Rust, shadcn, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Elasticsearch, QDrant, PostgreSQL.

Dust on Dust: as engineers, we have the incredible chance to work on a product we use every day.

Our culture

• Product-First: Unlike others focused on building foundation models, we're laser-focused on creating delightful product experiences with existing LLMs.

• Small, High-Impact Team: Join a team of alumni from Stripe, Front, OpenAI, and other top tech companies. We're intentionally keeping our team small and mighty – every engineer has massive scope and impact.

• Transparency & Collaboration: Our repository is open source, and we leverage serendipity between team members. We believe the best ideas emerge when the team shares information and insights openly.

• Proactive Problem-Solving: If you see something broken, fix it—without waiting for permission. We don't wait for solutions - we create them.

• Ship to Learn: We move fast and learn from real user feedback.

• Intellectual Humility: We value strong convictions balanced with open-mindedness. Team members confidently advocate for their ideas while remaining receptive to new perspectives and evidence that might change their minds. If new data emerges, we adapt quickly.

What you’ll do

• Own critical features end-to-end: Design and implement core product experiences that directly impact how users interact with AI.

• Scope and lead technical projects to completion with an eye on the full stack and a mind for opinionated prioritization.

• Collaborate closely with users: Work directly with customers to understand their needs and rapidly iterate on solutions.

• Build for scale: Design and implement systems that gracefully handle increasing complexity while maintaining simplicity for users.

Tech Stack Highlights

• Dust for Dust: We use Dust for Coding, debugging, knowledge search (runbooks, codebase), incident management, and task automation (i.e., creating issues).

• Programming languages: TypeScript, Rust (not a requirement; we’re open to people who are experts in other programming languages).

• Other relevant tools and technologies:

  • Front end: React, shadcn

  • Backend: NextJS, Kubernetes, Terraform/Helm

  • Database: PostgreSQL, QDrant, Elasticsearch

  • DevOps: Datadog monitoring, Github actions-based CI/CD

Benefits & Compensation

• Competitive compensation: €30K - €150K* base salary

• We offer substantial support for relocation, including a stipend up to €10k, finding an apartment in Paris, and supporting you with all residence and work permit-related procedures.

• Significant equity package in a Sequoia-backed startup

• Health insurance for you and your dependents

• New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc.

• Beautiful office in the heart of Paris

• Opportunity to travel to the US multiple times a year

• Regular team events and offsites

Growth and recognition

We keep our engineering structure simple. Rather than assigning people to a ladder of levels, we focus on the scope of their work, their reliability, and the impact they have on the team over time.

Every engineer joins Dust as an Engineer, regardless of seniority. We expect engineers to be dependable, move with purpose, and expand their impact as they become familiar with the team, the product, and our customers.

Location

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris, San Francisco, and New York because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

We have an office-first culture. Some of the best things about building at Dust are the energy, the fast decisions, and the unexpected conversations that unlock a hard problem, which happen because we are in the same room. Being together is not a formality, it is how we do our best work, and it is something we actively protect.

That said, we hire people with strong judgement and we extend that trust to how they manage their time. When working from home makes more sense for what you need to get done that day, we trust you to make that call.

Why Dust

The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves.

We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast.

If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk.

Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution, a story about our mission

• Agents at work - Latent Space, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024

• LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024