Tower (tower.dev) | Senior Backend / Platform Engineer | London or Berlin | HYBRID | Full-time
Tower is a Python-native serverless data platform. Data teams write plain Python, and we handle packaging, dependency resolution, scheduling, and execution across a serverless runtime built on Apache Iceberg. There's no clusters to manage, no YAML to write, no pipelines to rewrite to fit someone else's engine. If you've ever wanted your local Python script to just run in production at scale without a Databricks detour, that's the product.
We're a small, senior team split between London and Berlin. We've built a lot of tech: Custom run dispatch service, multi-region routing, storage based on Apache Iceberg, and the runtime itself, to name a few. This is deep systems work--things like scheduling, distributed execution, and performance. We're not gluing SaaS together.
Stack: Go and Rust for the platform, Python everywhere it matters, Kubernetes (EKS + Karpenter) on AWS, RDS Postgres, ElastiCache Redis, S3/Iceberg, WorkOS for auth.
Looking for:
* strong distributed-systems fundamentals
* comfort owning a system end to end
* taste for correctness under load
Bonus: data-platform, query-engine, or Iceberg experience; async Rust; Kubernetes internals.
Got it, so every country should focus on having a mediocre-at-best AI strategy by refusing to work together? Surely this will create a better future instead of pooling resources.
This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man.
On the brain drain problem in particular, one way to ensure talent sticks around is to create a good environment for people to do their best work. In much of Europe, getting bureaucracy out of the way and encouraging real investment would go a long way. People leave because they can make more money and they want to be surrounded by the best people. People would trade some of that off to stick around their home countries, however if you go to California and talk to folks from e.g. NL or DE working on this stuff, they have a lot to say about innovation and working culture back home.
When you're successful and rich (enough, at least), this is a nice whimsical thing to say. When you're suffering in the trenches, this isn't very helpful.
I have a really hard time telling if this is despite the current administration’s best efforts, because the current administration’s policies, or just an artifact of government inertia.
Top level: Super excited to witness this in my lifetime.
Edit: Also, my 40 years of life leads me towards the latter category.
I've actually been experimenting with using Ghidra and Opus to create human-consumable, reverse-engineered software. My ultimate dream would be a buildable EverQuest client. Opus does a decent job of pulling out various subsystems and understanding how it works. I was able to get a pretty much working networking layer for instance with less than an hour's work.
Tower | Senior/Principal Software Engineers | London, UK / Berlin, DE | https://jobs.tower.dev
Data teams waste countless hours wrestling with infrastructure instead of solving their businesses’ most critical problem: How to get more value from their data. The problem gets even worse with the AI revolution in flight. Tower changes that.
We're a Python-native serverless platform built on Apache Iceberg with powerful ETL and Lakehouse management tools. We integrate seamlessly with enterprise systems and make companies more nimble by letting them choose the best engine for each job while maintaining full data ownership.
We're focused on hiring developers that love the data ecosystem, are interested in really hard distributed systems problems, and working on dev tools.
Send a message to me, the CTO, at brad (at) tower.dev
Yeah I think there are a number of "hidden" dependencies on different regions, especially us-east-1. It's an artifact of it being AWS' largest region, etc.
Seems the underlying issue is with DynamoDB, according to the status page, which will have a big blast radius in other services. AWS' services form a really complicated graph and there's likely some dependency, potentially hidden, on us-east-1 in there.
us-east-1 was, probably still is, AWS' most massive deployment. Huge percentage of traffic goes through that region. Also, lots of services backhaul to that region, especially S3 and CloudFront. So even if your compute is in a different region (at Tower.dev we use eu-central-1 mostly), outages in us-east-1 can have some halo effect.
This outage seems really to be DynamoDB related, so the blast radius in services affected is going to be big. Seems they're still triaging.
CTO and Co-founder @ Tower.dev
Former Engineering Leader @ Snowflake
Former CTO and Co-founder @ Reflect (acquired, Puppet)
Former Director of Engineering @ Puppet
[email protected] / [email protected]