Software Engineer

Meet Chalk

Chalk is building machine learning infrastructure to answer the world’s hardest questions. Our platform is built to power credit, risk, insurance, medical, and recommendation decisions for the world’s most innovative companies. Answering these complex questions requires sourcing data from a wide range of providers and rapidly iterating on feature definitions. Chalk makes it easy for machine learning teams to build high-performance pipelines that deliver data to models at the right time. We orchestrate infrastructure and automatically track data lineage so developers can work confidently and focus on their unique products and insights.

We are working in-person Monday through Friday in our San Francisco office located in the Mission and we don't currently offer remote or hybrid type positions.

Meet Our Founders

• Elliot (https://linkedin.com/in/elliotmarx) started his career at Affirm where he built the early risk and credit data infrastructure system (the inspiration for Chalk). He then started Haven Money (with Andy) which Credit Karma acquired to power its banking products.
• Andy (https://linkedin.com/in/amoreland) met Elliot at Stanford admit weekend – Elliot was his room host and they’ve been best friends ever since. After school, Andy worked at Palantir on large government data infrastructure projects. He then founded Haven Money (with Elliot) which now powers Credit Karma Money.
• Marc (https://linkedin.com/in/marcff) spent many years at Google where he helped to launch the first version of Google Wallet. He went on to start Index which Stripe acquired as its in-store payment solution – it’s now called Stripe Terminal.

About the role

We are hiring Software Engineers to join our team. This is an opportunity to join as an early employee and make a large impact at a high growth start-up. You will tackle challenging engineering problems with a high degree of autonomy and ownership.

We are looking for a software engineer with a strong background in systems engineering. At Chalk we are solving problems drawn from the fields of DBMS query planning & optimization, compilers, and distributed analytical data processing systems.

Chalk uses dynamic and static analysis of Python programs in order to optimize arbitrary user Python code, infers and orchestrates infrastructure implied by the structure of that code, and tracks metadata about flow of data through these systems.

What you will do

• Work directly with Chalk’s co-founders to productionize our first iteration
• Write Python and Rust
• Design, implement, ship, and maintain significant components of our query planning and execution engine
• Iterate rapidly to improve Chalk’s platform in response to customer needs

What we’re looking for

• Strong working knowledge of computer science fundamentals. We’re not looking for experience from drilling leet code – we need folks who are comfortable building and maintaining real systems
• Comfort with leading development of new components of existing systems, and with taking ownership of existing software
• Track record of learning new concepts quickly
• Ability to work autonomously & to make pragmatic tradeoffs with an eye towards business outcomes
• Strong communication skills

Bonus points

• Experience implementing data infrastructure
• Experience with distributed systems/compilers/query planners
• Experience with Rust
• Experience with developing PaaS-like software

Inclusivity

Chalk is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and inclusion and provide reasonable accommodations to anyone in need of individualized support.