Founding Systems Engineer

Founding Systems Engineer (Rust & Program Analysis)
Location: Remote
Role: Founding Systems Engineer (#1 / #2 Engineering Hire)
Core Stack: Rust, Tree-sitter, Graph Algorithms, Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Equity & Comp: High Equity (meaningful founder-level stake) + Competitive Base
About Arbor
AI coding agents can generate or refactor 100,000 lines of code faster than any human can review it. But LLMs are non-deterministic, burn through context windows re-reading entire repositories, and have zero structural awareness of how a change in file A blows up a critical dependency in file Z.
Arbor solves this by building the deterministic intelligence layer for code.
We parse codebases into structured dependency graphs, compute change blast radiuses in real time, and feed exact, deterministic context into coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor) and human pull request workflows. Our open-source engine parses a 178,000 LOC repository (like Tokio) in under 253 milliseconds nearly 10x faster than traditional tools.
We are launching Arbor Cloud, backed by credits from Anthropic, Microsoft, and AWS, and we are hiring our Founding Systems Engineer to co-architect the core engine.
What You’ll Own & Build
You will take ownership of the core analysis engine and graph infrastructure:
High-Performance AST Parsing & Call Graphs: Architect multi-language parsing pipelines using Tree-sitter and Rust, building call graphs, type references, and symbol resolution engines that run in milliseconds.
Deterministic Blast-Radius Algorithms: Design fast graph-traversal algorithms that calculate reachability, transitive dependencies, and risk metrics across complex repositories with zero false positives.
Incremental Graph Engine & Caching: Implement differential analysis so our GitHub PR bot and cloud runners recompute graphs on diffs within sub-second latencies rather than reparsing from scratch.
Agent Integration Protocols: Expand our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server interfaces and CLI toolchains, making Arbor the default context engine for local CLI agents and IDEs.
Architecture & Standards: As the founding systems engineer, you set the conventions: zero-cost abstractions, memory efficiency, safe concurrency, and CI benchmark suites.
What We’re Looking For
Deep Rust Systems Experience: You write idiomatic, memory-safe, high-concurrency Rust. You understand lifetimes, arena allocation, zero-copy parsing, and profiling (perf, flamegraph).
Compilers / Static Analysis Foundation: Familiarity with ASTs, CFGs (Control Flow Graphs), call-graph construction, or tools like Tree-sitter, Roslyn, LLVM, or rustc internals.
Performance Obsession: You care about memory overhead, cache locality, and sub-millisecond execution loops. If parsing takes 2 seconds instead of 200ms, it bugs you.
Product Pragmatism: You want to ship real developer tools that run in production CI/CD pipelines, not write academic papers. You know when an 80/20 heuristic is better than a slow complete constraint solver.
Zero-to-One Mindset: You are comfortable working with ambiguity, owning entire crates from scratch, and debating architecture directly with the founders.
Nice-to-Haves
Prior experience building developer tools, CLI utilities, code search engines, or language servers (LSP/DAP).
Contributions to open-source systems software, Rust crates, or compiler frontends.
Hands-on experience with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or agentic developer workflows (Cursor, Claude Code, Aider).
Why Arbor?
Founding Ownership: You are not ticket-crunching inside a massive hierarchy. You will shape the codebase, technical strategy, and culture from day one with significant equity.
Hard Technical Problems: We don't build standard CRUD wrappers. This is low-level systems programming, graph theory, and compiler analysis applied to the fastest-growing sector in tech (AI software engineering).
High Velocity: We ship continuously, test against massive production open-source codebases, and maintain a tight feedback loop with real developers.
How to Apply
Skip the standard generic cover letter. Send an email to [anand@getarbor.dev] with:
A link to your GitHub, crates.io profile, or personal projects.
A brief teardown of a hard systems or Rust problem you worked through (a tricky borrow checker issue, a parsing pipeline, or a performance bottleneck you solved).
One thing you think current AI coding agents get fundamentally wrong about codebase context.

Work arrangement
Yes