Junction Labs - Founding Engineer
  • Base: $200k
  • Equity: 1% - 4%
  • Location: In person, New York, NY

Junction Labs is reimagining service-to-service communication for the modern era. Today, developers must choose between antiquated DNS primitives or complex service meshes. We're creating a new platform building block that enables dynamic configuration, intelligent routing, and seamless service discovery. We’ve raised seed funding and we're looking for a founding engineer to help transform internet infrastructure.

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Our Vision
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We're building Junction Labs with a foundational vision: to revolutionize how software communicates first in data-centers, and later across the Internet. Here's what drives us:

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First, we're tackling an ambitious technical challenge that could reshape internet infrastructure. While replacing DNS for service-to-service communication might sound audacious, we're taking inspiration from the early AWS playbook. Just as S3 and EC2 started with carefully chosen primitives that grew into world-changing infrastructure, we're building foundational pieces that will evolve into a comprehensive platform. We believe the future of service communication needs more than simple name resolution – it needs dynamic configuration, intelligent routing, and robust service discovery built in from the ground up.

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Second, we understand that infrastructure systems demand exceptional quality. When engineers mock its rare faults with 'it was DNS,' they're actually highlighting something remarkable: DNS usually achieves five-nines availability or better, which is why it persists despite its limitations. We're matching this standard through multiple layers: rigorous systems architecture, comprehensive failure mode analysis, and extensive testing infrastructure. Every line of code we write is treated as mission-critical because, in production, it will be. 

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Third, we're developers building for developers. Too many infrastructure platforms end up being solutions that developers hate as they work differently in development versus production. We're breaking this pattern by investing heavily in developer experience from day one. This means creating intuitive APIs that expose powerful functionality without overwhelming complexity, building SDKs that make local testing match production behavior, and ensuring that developers can understand and predict how our system will behave in any environment.

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You'll thrive here if:

  • You're energized by the challenge of building developer tools that are both powerful and delightful to use.
  • You have deep distributed systems experience, demonstrated through designing and implementing systems that handle significant scale. Experience with the nitty-gritty of HTTP and DNS is a plus.
  • You're excited to work in Rust. Prior experience is not a must, but our foundational code on both the client and server are written in Rust, and you’ll be interacting with them day-to-day. Experience with another systems programming language is a plus.
  • You enjoy varied technical challenges. In addition to low-level problems, you’ll be creating  SDKs in multiple client languages, making deep investments in testing and documentation, and doing the DevOps/SRE work to make sure our infrastructure is at least as reliable as DNS.

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About us:

  • Ian Nowland has been in the industry for 25 years now. 11 of those were as a developer, including being the founding engineer of AWS EMR. Ian was the founder and lead of the EC2 Nitro initiative, and later spent 4 years as one of the two SVP Engineering at Datadog. After 14 years of management, Ian is excited to be working much more hands on trying to create world-changing developer infrastructure.
  • Ben Linsay has over 15 years of professional experience in building software, including 4 startups at all different stages. Ben spent the last 6 years building platforms at Two Sigma, a NYC based financial sciences company, giving him plenty of exposure to building and running distributed systems. Ben is excited to make the world a little bit better for everyone building large systems. 

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If you believe you are a good complement to our team and a fit for this role, please reach out directly to Ian at inowland@junctionlabs.io.