Backend Software Engineer (Rust, Fully Remote)

JobCubby; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Remote-first culture

Async-friendly work

Job summary

MetalBear is a remote-first, early-stage company building mirrord, a Kubernetes development platform that lets developers and AI agents run code against a live cluster before deployment.

Join a small, world‑class engineering team to implement Rust-powered cloud-native features, collaborate on architecture, and engage with users to understand requirements and rapidly fix issues in distributed environments.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software development experience.
• At least 1 year of writing production-grade Rust.
• Based between UTC-5 and UTC+4.
• Strong systems-level thinking and the ability to debug complex, distributed environments.
• Comfort working async in a remote-first startup environment.
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments beyond the basics (Docker, containers, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with backend infrastructure tooling like datastores, message brokers, GitOps tools, etc.
• Good communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Contribute Rust code that creates, manages, reconfigures and adapts cloud resources.
• Use AI smartly to deliver high quality code, faster.
• Collaborate closely with our small, world-class engineering team on architecture, new feature design and infrastructure.
• Engage directly with users to gather requirements, develop solutions, and debug issues.

Skills

Rust

Distributed systems

Async

Cloud-native

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GitOps

Job description

MetalBear is remote-first, early-stage, and product-led. We're building mirrord, a Kubernetes development platform that lets developers and AI coding agents run code against a live cluster before it's deployed.

The problem we solve is the wait. In any organization running microservices, checking whether a change actually works means building an image, pushing it, deploying to a shared environment, and waiting on a pipeline to tell you. That loop runs many times a day per engineer, and it's the single biggest tax on how fast an organization ships. With mirrord, the service runs wherever the work is already happening: on a laptop, in CI, or inside an agent's sandbox. Its traffic, environment variables, and file access are forwarded to and from a shared staging cluster, so the service behaves exactly as it would if it were deployed, without deploying it. Feedback arrives in seconds instead of minutes, against real APIs, real schemas, and real traffic rather than mocks or a hand-maintained local stack.

That matters more every month, because AI agents now write a large share of the code our customers ship. An agent generating code from static files is guessing at how the rest of the system behaves, and a human has to catch the guesses. mirrord gives the agent the real context to write against and a real feedback loop to verify against, so what lands in review is something a reviewer can trust.

mirrord is used by thousands of developers worldwide, including at Fortune 500 companies.

The Cloud Integrations team owns features that involve automatically managing users’ cloud services (like message brokers, databases, Kubernetes resources and more) to create virtually separate environments with only minimal resource duplication. These are key features that make mirrord uniquely valuable in complex enterprise environments.

What You’ll Do

• Contribute Rust code that creates, manages, reconfigures and adapts cloud resources.
• Use AI smartly to deliver high quality code, faster.
• Collaborate closely with our small, world‑class engineering team on architecture, new feature design and infrastructure.
• Engage directly with users to gather requirements, develop solutions, and debug issues.

Requirements

At least 3 years of professional software development experience.

• Of which at least one year of writing production‑grade Rust.
• Based between UTC-5 and UTC+4
• Strong systems‑level thinking and an ability to debug complex, distributed environments.
• Comfort working async in a remote‑first startup environment.
• Familiarity with cloud‑native environments (Docker, containers, Kubernetes) beyond the basics.
• Familiarity with backend infrastructure tooling like datastores, message brokers, GitOps tools, etc.
• Good communication skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience building developer tools.
• Experience building Kubernetes operators or other components that interact with the Kubernetes API.
• DevOps or Platform experience.

Why Join MetalBear

• Work on hard, meaningful problems at the intersection of local development and cloud infrastructure.
• Be part of a small, high‑caliber team where your work directly impacts thousands of developers and some of the world’s biggest companies.
• Remote‑first, async‑friendly, and low on meetings.
• Competitive salary, meaningful stock options, and a culture that values focus and autonomy.