We’re [0] rethinking serverless from scratch, building a new computing stack for instant, globally available, truly elastic, soundly isolated execution. We leverage formal methods and languages to build OS interfaces with low overhead, formally verified isolation without containers or VMs. Our immediate goal is a new programming language to replace eBPF and build the world's first serverless networking infrastructure.
We are a 5-person, VC-funded team with PhDs from Stanford, UW, OSU, and Brown, advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo. We are currently hiring for the following four positions:
At Formal [0], we’re rethinking serverless from scratch: we’re building a new computing stack for instant, globally available, truly elastic, soundly isolated execution. We leverage formal methods and languages to build OS interfaces with low overhead, formally verified isolation without containers or VMs. Our immediate goal is to write a new programming language to replace eBPF and build the world's first serverless networking infrastructure.
We are a 5-person, VC-funded team with PhDs from Stanford, UW, OSU, and Brown, advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo. We are currently hiring for the following four positions:
- [2] Formal Verification Engineer: Formal Methods and Programming Languages ($120k - $200k + ≥ 0.25%)
- [3] Software Engineer: Compilers and Programming Languages ($100k - $175k + ≥ 0.2%)
- [4] Formal Methods PhD Intern: Formal Methods and Programming Languages (≥ $5k / month)
Please see [5] for general information. To apply, email us at (work at formalstack dot com) and let us know how your experiences fit the role and its requirements.
Hey Sergio! I applied for the role of founding engineer a couple of months ago and passed the different stages. We had even been talking about the exact salary package and start date, decided to talk again in a couple of weeks about the specifics, but then I never heard back, despite reaching out to you again.
It’s totally fine if plans change and you decide not to move forward with a candidate, but I think a short email isn’t too much to ask after spending multiple hours on the various interviews.
That said, the interview process was otherwise pretty good and the work you’re doing sounds really interesting, so I would still encourage others to apply. Best of luck with Formal!
We're building a new computing stack for instant, globally available, truly elastic, soundly isolated execution. We’re building low overhead, formally verified isolation primitives, without containers or VMs. We're taking all of this to the network with new a programming language to replace eBPF and enable truly serverless networking infrastructure.
We are a 5-person, VC-funded team with PhDs from Stanford, UW, OSU, and Brown, advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo. We are looking for a formal verification engineer [1] with deep and practical experience with Rocq.
Please email us at (work at formalstack dot com) and let us know how you fit the role [1].
We're rethinking the computing stack from the ground up for truly elastic, soundly isolated, instantly and globally available execution. We’re building OS interfaces and compilers for low overhead, formally verified isolation without containers or VMs. We're starting with the network: a programming language to replace eBPF and enable globally programmable networking as a service.
We are a 4-person, VC-funded team with PhDs from Stanford, UW, and OSU, advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo. We are hiring founding-level software engineers [1] in compilers, programming languages, & verification.
Please email us at (work at formalstack dot com) and let us know how you fit the role [1]. While we are only able to move forward with strictly qualifying applicants at this time, we welcome conversations with anyone interested.
I am not qualified for your current hiring needs, but this is extremely interesting to me.
Right now, I am currently learning Rust and have some side projects planned writing interpreters and compilers therein, and would love to take you up on the offer to have "conversations with anyone interested" so I can learn more about what you're building and learn some things.
We're rethinking the computing stack from the ground up for truly elastic, soundly isolated, instantly and globally available execution. We’re building OS interfaces and compilers for low overhead, formally verified isolation without containers or VMs. We're starting with the network: a programming language to replace eBPF and enable globally programmable networking as a service.
We are VC-funded ($700k pre-seed), advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo, and founded by ex-Stanford PhDs. There are two official roles, but we welcome conversations with anyone interested in joining the team.
Hi Sergio, I mailed you an open proposal for a Junior kernel-hacking position in this stellar team of yours. The end-goal (objective) is astounding and the initial goals for the objective are daunting to say the least!
Hi Geraldo! Thank you for the kind words, and for sending a message! The influx of responses has far exceeded any expectation I could have had, and I'm slowly but diligently responding as I go. Just wanted to let you know that I've received your message and I'm looking forward to chatting with you further. :)
Woah, that sounds really cool! I did some research this summer on running programs in kernel space and tactics used to verify safety. This sounds right up my alley—-if I had any of the qualifications!
If you haven't already, please feel welcome to send us a message! Even if these specific opportunities might not make sense, if this is something you're potentially interested in working on, perhaps there are other opportunities to be found. If nothing else, we're always excited to talk to anyone who's as excited as we are about the general direction.
This is actually possible with fairings! Because fairings can rewrite requests, it's possible to create a fairing that rewrites a request URI of `path/` to `path` or vice-versa as needed. Rocket will route the rewritten request normally. In psuedocode, such a fairing might look like:
on_request => |request, _| {
if request.uri().path().ends_with('/') {
let new_path = request.uri().path()[..-1];
request.set_uri(URI::new(new_path));
}
}
You can also use a fairing If you want to return a 302 (or similar) so that the browser does the redirect instead. In this case, you'd implement a response fairing that rewrites failed responses to return a redirect to the appropriate URI. Again, in pseudocode, this would look like:
Database support will live outside of Rocket's core in Rocket's contrib [0] library. Everything in contrib is implemented independently of Rocket and is entirely optional to use. The implementation will be database agnostic and extensible to any database. I'm a big believer in pluggable, optional components with no forced decisions [1], and database support will follow the same philosophy.
Thanks for trying out Rocket! There are a couple of examples in Rocket's repository that illustrate how to use Rocket with a database. The more complete of the two is the todo example [0]. This uses Diesel as its ORM alongside managed state to maintain a pool of database connections. The second example of the two uses raw SQLite without a connection pool [1]. It's meant to be a bare bones illustration of using a database with Rocket.
Managed state is a feature specifically designed to help with this kind of thing. That being said, I still think Rocket can do more to abstract away database connections. I'm tracking improvements on this front in GitHub issue #167 [2].
Thanks so much for the helpful reply! I should've noted that I haven't actually tried Rocket. :) It was a couple other frameworks that I'd played with, all of which seemed to go shrug, not our concern when the question of managed state came up. I'll give Rocket a try and see if I have better luck.
We’re [0] rethinking serverless from scratch, building a new computing stack for instant, globally available, truly elastic, soundly isolated execution. We leverage formal methods and languages to build OS interfaces with low overhead, formally verified isolation without containers or VMs. Our immediate goal is a new programming language to replace eBPF and build the world's first serverless networking infrastructure.
We are a 5-person, VC-funded team with PhDs from Stanford, UW, OSU, and Brown, advised by professors from MIT and UWaterloo. We are currently hiring for the following four positions:
- [1] Staff Software Engineer: Compilers, Programming Languages, and Verification ($175k - $250k + ≥ 0.4%)
- [2] Formal Verification Engineer: Formal Methods and Programming Languages ($120k - $200k + ≥ 0.2%)
- [3] Software Engineer: Compilers and Programming Languages ($100k - $175k + ≥ 0.1%)
- [4] Formal Methods PhD Intern: Formal Methods and Programming Languages ($10k / month)
Please see [5] for general information. Apply via our job board [6].
[0]: https://formalstack.com [1]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/12-2025/staff-software-engineer... [2]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/12-2025/formal-verification-eng... [3]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/12-2025/software-engineer-v.pdf [4]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/12-2025/formal-methods-phd-inte... [5]: https://formalstack.com/jobs/info.pdf [6]: https://jobs.gem.com/formal