Software Engineer

The cloud-backed terminal for individuals and teams

Warp is modernizing the command line to make it more intuitive, collaborative, and intelligent for developers and teams.

We believe there’s an opportunity to build a generational company known for considered, high quality developer products  – products developers love rather than tools they tolerate – to displace antiquated developer tools that have mediocre user experiences.

The traditional terminal is a prime example of this type of tool having not meaningfully changed in the past 40 years, and is ripe for innovation. By fundamentally reimagining its experience – improving its UX, making it intelligent and collaborative – we can help developers ship better software more quickly.

For more information on our team and culture, we highly recommend reading our How We Work.

As a Software Engineer, you will…

• Participate in all aspects of software development activities, including design, coding, code review, unit/integration testing, bug fixing, and code/API documentation.

• Collaborate closely with the rest of engineering, as well as other stakeholders from our growth, marketing, and product teams, to plan features and build a high quality product that elevates the productivity of all developers.

• Improve Warp's performance and reliability by building new features or polishing existing parts of the product.

• Prototype ideas and concepts to get quick feedback from internal and external users

• Work across the entire technical stack to ensure users have the most efficient and delightful experience using Warp. The features you develop will span all aspects of the user experience, making you an expert on what their needs are.

• Be a mentor and provide thoughtful feedback to your peers, and build strong personal connections with your teammates!

You may be a good fit if...

• You are passionate about helping developers get more done — would jump at the chance to work on this particular product

• You have amazing engineering chops, but are also product- and user-focused

• You have great communication and collaboration skills

• You’re sensitive to developers’ needs, and can develop warm relationships with developers

• Bonus:

  • Building native apps in Rust or WASM

  • Shell or Linux-programming

  • Server-side programming in go

  • OpenGL, WebG, or other graphics programming

At Warp, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. So if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in this job description – we encourage you to apply anyways! We are a community of curious learners, and most of us are learning some skills for the first time (like our engineers learning to program Warp in Rust). You might be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Salary Transparency

Total compensation at Warp consists of two parts: 1) a competitive base salary, and most importantly, 2) meaningful equity.

When we find the right person, we try to put our best foot forward with an offer that excites you. We consider what you’d like to be paid, the skills and level of experience you bring, what similar jobs pay, and make sure there’s equal pay for equal work among those you’ll be working with. The budgeted compensation amount for this role is targeted at $145,000 - $260,000.

In addition to salary, all employees receive further compensation in the form of equity in the company. This is a meaningful stock option grant with a four-year vesting period and one-year cliff. Your equity is where most of the significant upside potential is. Comparing startup equity is always a bit tricky, so we’re happy to walk you through different valuation scenarios at the offer stage in order to help paint a clearer picture of the upside.

Final total compensation is determined by multiple factors including your experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

What We Offer

• Competitive Salary & Meaningful Equity – we will stretch to get the right talent on board

• Full Medical, Dental and Vision Benefits

• Flexible remote-first culture, with optional WeWork in SF and an office space in NYC for folks who want to work together IRL 

• 20-days of Paid Time Off

• 12 US Holidays

• 16 weeks of paid Parental Leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents

• Twice-a-year company retreats

• Monthly gym stipend

• 401(k)

• Pre-Tax FSA Health Savings Plan

• Complimentary OneMedical membership

Individuals seeking employment at Warp are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

About Warp

We are a company run by product-first builders, building a core product for all developers. We are committed to understanding our users deeply. We believe we will ultimately build the best product and business if that team includes developers and designers from a wide range of backgrounds. The early team comes from Google, Dropbox, Gem, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We are looking for passionate individuals to join us and help bring Warp to the world.

We value honesty, humility, and pragmatism, and our core product principle is focusing on the user. If you’re interested in learning more about our company values and what our engineering team culture is like, please take a look at our internal How We Work guide.

We’re very fortunate to be backed by a great group of venture capital firms. In August 2023, we announced a $50M Series B funding round ($73M total raised), led by Sequoia Capital. Our other investors include Google Ventures, Neo, and Box Group. We are also backed by a network of passionate angels, including Dylan Field (Co-Founder and CEO, Figma), Elad Gil (early investor in Airbnb, Pinterest, Stripe, and Square), Jeff Weiner (Executive Chairman and Ex-CEO, LinkedIn), Marc Benioff (Founder and CEO, Salesforce), and Sam Altman (Co-Founder & CEO, OpenAI).

The Product

Here's our latest demo showing some of our current features…

This is just the start, as our plan is to build out a set of experiences in the terminal that don’t exist today like collaboration, environment sharing, rich data types and more.

The Opportunity

The terminal is one of very few tools used by every developer every day, which makes it an ideal gateway to improving all sorts of developer activities. We believe there is an opportunity to build a unicorn-sized business improving the command-line. Our strategy is bottom-up developer adoption, followed by driving revenue through enterprise sales and distribution partnerships. 

To start, our goal is to become the everyday terminal of choice with individual users – immediately usable as a backwards-compatible terminal replacement with the developer’s shell of choice. We have built a closed-source server, which will implement all of the cloud-enabled features. These features will invite users to share their work with others, driving growth and encouraging collaboration. We’ll also focus on building a community and an ecosystem of terminal plugins and apps, creating network effects.

At higher levels of team penetration, we will offer an enterprise plan with features around privacy, security and environment management (e.g. secure distribution and management of API keys). These larger enterprise plans will be the ultimate driver of revenue, along with potential distribution deals for companies that see CLI integrations as a way to reach new customers.

A couple college students, totally unprompted, wrote a piece on why new students should work at Warp as part of their new newsletter they are launching called "Why You Should Join." It's an incredibly well researched and thoughtful article about the market and competitive landscape, and accurately reflects our thesis. Read it here.