Platform Engineer — Generalist

About the role

About Us

Poly is building a better file storage platform for everyone. We've raised $8M from YC, Bloomberg Beta, Felicis, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, and more, and we're looking to grow our founding team of superstar builders and dreamers.

Poly’s intelligent file system is a desktop and web application that lets you store and browse your files with the help of a powerful multimodal AI. An easy way to wrap your head around it is to check out a demo from Abhay

We are adamant that Poly is the future way to store files for everyone because:

- Our product is intelligent -- all your files are indexed and searchable with an AI that can find and even sort and organize your files, search by image and many other file types, and soon ask questions about your files and watch as an AI system references your own files to give an answer.

- We’re maximally multimodal. We support any audio, video, document, office file, slide deck, text file, PDF, and a whole lot more. We even support saving web links and youtube videos to your Poly file system and asking the AI about them.

- We’re completely, 100% cross-platform -- Our product looks identical across web and desktop, with zero compromises in the UI/UX, and all your files always available and up-to-date.

- Our product improves every 2 days, not every 2 years -- Finder and File Explorer haven't changed in years or decades because they're linked to OS upgrade cycles. Our product ships updates every day and can add all kinds of features, fixes, and file type support at light speed.

- Many, many more reasons -- deep folder searching, beautiful view modes, extensible metadata, ergonomics, public sharing, and so much more.

About You

We are looking to grow from a team of three (we've accomplished a lot as just two engineers and one designer!) to a clan of around eight, so you'll be anywhere from engineer #3 to #7. You'll be tasked with bringing Poly to life as a robust platform, shaping our cloud architecture to store files at breathtaking speed and scale, and improving our AI architecture to become the "search engine for your life".

Specifically, in a platform engineer (generalist) role, we are looking for the following concrete skills and prior experience

- Core software design and architectural considerations in developing a globally distributed, highly available file storage service that lets you collaborate, version control, and much more without ever fearing data loss.

- Experience designing database schemas to be fast, efficient, flexible, and ergonomic, empowering your team to build upon your work seamlessly.

- Interest in data modeling, cache design, and local-first systems that require challenging fault tolerance and non-blocking bi-directional schemas. Ability to reason about runtime characteristics, state management, and risk-to-performance trade-offs.

- Experience or significant enthusiasm for the Rust language, which comprises our entire stack from front-end to back. Our platform is based on a very large, robust shared library that is compiled on web, desktop, and cloud to create an unparalleled DevEx for building a product as complex as Poly. Poly's codebase is all welded metal, no glue.