- A build, test, or deployment improvement. Trace where the time goes, identify repeated work or a reliability problem, and verify the change against the same workload.
- A provisioning or developer-tooling workflow that another engineer can run and troubleshoot from its documentation.
- A small code change that eliminates repeated work, improves build or cache efficiency, or speeds up a developer workflow, with tests for the behavior it changes.
- Diagnostics that connect a failed operation to the relevant logs, metrics, and resource state, followed by a fix for the underlying problem.
Your project will have an agreed scope and completion criteria. The outcome should be usable by the team, with tests, documentation, and a clear account of its limitations.
What we look for
You have completed a meaningful programming project in Go, Rust, C, C++, or a similar language. You can explain its design, inspect its behavior on Linux, and investigate a failure. Experience with CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, networking, or infrastructure as code is useful.
Show us a tool someone used, a service you operated, a difficult bug you reproduced, or an experiment that led to a working improvement. Research and coursework are welcome too. Tell us what you personally implemented, including any decisions or extensions beyond the starting instructions.
When you get stuck, you narrow the problem, read the relevant source or documentation, and try an experiment that can teach you something. You ask for help with the evidence you've collected and explain what you need to understand next. You act on feedback and keep ownership of the result.
You use AI coding tools where they help. You must be able to explain the resulting code, test its behavior, and correct it when it is wrong. We care about your judgment and understanding throughout the work.
We evaluate the work relative to your experience and opportunities. A degree, a particular employer, or owning hardware is not a prerequisite. Be specific about what you have already learned and where you want to go deeper.