Programming Language Engineer

Founding Programming Language Engineer role at an early-stage startup. The ideal candidate will have shipped a programming language to users or contributed significantly to a major language (e.g., TypeScript, Python, JavaScript, Kotlin, Mojo) or worked at a programming language-first company (e.g., Vercel on Next.js team). The role requires strong first-principles thinking about programming language design, including understanding of nondeterministic programming languages, compiler design patterns, and language learnability. The engineer will be responsible for designing novel approaches to programming language creation that go beyond existing literature. Key qualities sought: ability to think deeply about design problems, curiosity and love of learning, resilience when facing hard problems, interdisciplinary thinking, and willingness to work intensely on a high-risk early-stage startup. The candidate should be comfortable joining a two-person team and working long hours to solve difficult problems. Preference for candidates with founder potential or serious interest in founding.

Programming Language Engineer

Core task: ensures that we make the winning design decisions in xmd, to create the best structure for programming in English.

Business value: xmd replaces traditional programming languages. This means that implementing xmd comes with similar design and engineering challenges.

Looking for:

1. Has previously shipped a programming language to users.
2. Flexibility in the mental model.     Can think about language design from first principles rather than just existing paradigms.
3. But: knows how to apply existing PL/compiler techniques where they are relevant.