Restate careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Restate has raised $7M in a single seed round announced on June 10, 2024, led by Redpoint Ventures with Essence VC and firstminute capital participating. Angels include Apache Kafka co-creators Jay Kreps and Neha Narkhede of Confluent, Datadog founder Olivier Pomel, Shawn "swyx" Wang, and infrastructure founders Monica Sarbu, Guy Fighel and Roopak Venkatakrishnan. As of July 2026 Tracxn still lists $7M total over one round, and no Series A has been announced.

Restate is a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows and backend services into durable processes: every step of your code is journaled in a log, so a crash, restart or failed API call resumes exactly where it left off instead of forcing you to hand-build retries, state machines and idempotency keys. The whole engine ships as a single Rust binary with its own embedded storage and distributed log (RocksDB plus a purpose-built log called Bifrost), so there is no separate database or queue to run. SDKs cover TypeScript, Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, Rust and Ruby, and there are integrations for the Vercel AI SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, Pydantic AI and LangChain.

The project was introduced in August 2023, hit 1.0 alongside the early-access launch of Restate Cloud in June 2024, and the open source repository has around 4,450 GitHub stars. It runs as open source, as the managed Restate Cloud, or since July 2026 as Restate BYOC inside a customer's own AWS or GCP account. Customers include Replit, whose president Michele Catasta says "Restate now handles all durable orchestration at Replit", a Fortune 100 US bank running treasury, bank account and credit card operations on it, the ERP company DOSS, Edge Delta, Unkey and Coralogix. Production deployments exceed 100,000 durable actions per second, and Restate Cloud reached SOC 2 Type I in February 2026 with the Type II audit in progress.

Stephan Ewen, Co-founder. One of the original creators of Apache Flink, which grew out of the Stratosphere research project he worked on at TU Berlin, and co-founder and CTO of data Artisans, the Berlin company behind Flink, from 2014 until Alibaba acquired it in January 2019 for about 90 million euros and renamed it Ververica. PhD in Computer Science from TU Berlin in the DIMA group under Volker Markl, with research internships at IBM Research and Microsoft Research. Based in Berlin.

Till Rohrmann, Co-founder. Apache Flink committer and PMC member who spent years as an engineer and engineering lead at data Artisans and Ververica working on Flink's distributed architecture, high-availability services and machine learning library. B.Sc. in Computer Science from TU Munich and M.Sc. from TU Berlin, with study periods at Ecole Polytechnique and the National University of Singapore. Based in Berlin.

Igal Shilman, Co-founder. Apache Flink committer and former engineering lead at Ververica, where he worked on Flink Stateful Functions, after data engineering roles at SoundCloud and Wix. B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Based in Berlin.

Ahmed Farghal, Co-founder and Systems Design Lead. Leads the design of the Restate runtime. Previously a lead engineer at Stripe supporting teams integrating payment methods such as PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and before that about seven years at Meta as a Staff Engineer on LogDevice and Scribe, the company's distributed log storage and streaming ingestion infrastructure, where he co-authored the 2018 post open-sourcing LogDevice. Studied at Mansoura University. Based in London.

Restate is a chance to build a new infrastructure primitive with the people who built the last one. The founding team created Apache Flink and ran the company behind it, and the wider team lists alumni of Apple, Stripe, Amazon and Meta, including engineers from Meta's LogDevice and Scribe log infrastructure. The technical bar is visible in public: the architecture post explains why the team wrote its own log and storage tier instead of layering on a database, and the published numbers are a median of 3ms per durable step, over 94,000 actions per second in benchmarks and a P99 under 170ms for a 10-step workflow on a multi-AZ deployment.

The company is small enough that individual roles are the function. Postings describe the first Forward Deployed Engineer, the first product marketing hire, a Developer Relations Lead who sets editorial direction, and a Frontend Engineer who owns the product UI end to end. Every role works directly with the founders, and the engineering posting promises "an unusually direct connection between the engineers building with Restate, the problems they're encountering, and the software we build to solve them."

Restate hires for opinions backed by shipped work. The design and frontend postings ask for "strong opinions and a portfolio that backs them up", expect you to work "with significant autonomy, working directly with the founding team, and pushing back when the team is wrong", and each ends with an explicit "Not a fit" list: people who expect a finished brief or heavy direction, people who want to lead a team rather than be the senior IC doing the work, and people not interested in the technical subject matter.

AI literacy is a stated requirement across roles rather than a perk. The Design Engineer posting expects you to be "using AI to multiply your own impact and to unblock yourself" and "not waiting for an engineer to help you take something live"; the Frontend posting wants someone who uses it daily and "can tell when the output needs throwing away rather than patching." The careers page frames the mission in the founders' own terms: Restate "sits at the intersection of distributed logs, databases, languages/compilers, streaming data processing, and service meshes", and the team says it is "passionate about developer experience" and likes building open source.

Restate hires through its Ashby board and has a standing "Create your own Role" posting for people who do not match an open role: applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, the company asks you not to expect a response within days, and recruiting reaches out directly if a future role fits. Titles matter less than evidence: the marketing posting says "We're less interested in specific titles than in demonstrated capability", the DevRel posting is "open on background" as long as your public work already gives you credibility with developers, and engineering roles ask for production experience with distributed or event-driven systems in Rust, Go, Java or similar.

Travel is written into each posting: minimal with occasional offsites for product roles, one to two weeks a quarter for the Forward Deployed Engineer, 15 to 30% for marketing and developer relations.