Windmill
Open-source platform to turn scripts into internal apps & workflows
Founding Rust + Typescript Software Engineer
About the role
Windmill is an open-source developer platform and workflow engine written in Rust with a frontend in TypeScript + Svelte and a CLI in TypeScript
It is popular with thousands of orgs using it in production every day, including enterprise customers. Windmill is the fastest workflow engine: https://www.windmill.dev/blog/launch-week-1/fastest-workflow-engine
The architecture is surprisingly simple:
- Postgresql (which includes the queue)
- Servers (serve the frontend + API)
- Workers (execute the jobs)
Windmill is the easiest way to write and deploy to production scripts in TypeScript, Python, Go, Bash, SQL and run them on the most efficient self-hostable infrastructure. It is poised to become the core of the internal stacks of the modern enterprise.
Try the app here
The team is based in Paris and looking to hire its next founding engineer
About the interview
- Intro call with Founder, to do a quick eval if there is a mutual fit, we also talk about logistics there (remote, location, visas, etc) (30 min)
- Intro call with the team: This is a team game, everyone must feel comfortable working with you (and mutually) (30 min)
- You get familiar with the Windmill codebase and architecture available on the Github repo, you ping us once ready
- You tell us about ideas and features you would be excited to work on and we discuss how you would implement it from high-level to low-level details (2h)
About Windmill
Windmill is an open-source developer platform and runtime to turn scripts into workflows & internal tools. It is the sweet-spot between Retool and Temporal, and an open-source alternative to Superblocks, Airplane and Pipedream.
Scripts in Python or Typescripts have their parameters analyzed and turned automatically into standalone apps and no-code modules. In flows, scripts can be sequenced into powerful workflows. It is similar to no-code tools except that each module is a script underneath and scripts can be shared on the WindmillHub for everyone to reuse in their flows. Windmill is an all-in-one queue/worker runtime, script editor, flow builder, secret management platform, OAuth platform credentials in a platform fit for enterprise with groups, granular permission and audit logs.
In addition the platform provides automatic generation of the UI by reading the scripts' parameters, cron scheduling, separation of credentials and logic, versioning, importing scripts from Github and more.
There are two modes of triggering for flows and scripts:
- With a cron schedule (parametrizable from the platform)
- Being triggered by a webhook (specific to each script/flow)
- From the automatically generated UI
- Through a dashboard/admin panel made through our UI builder
The main insight is that available no-code tools today are intuitive for non-technical users but lacks the extensibility that code provide. On the other hand, writing code is only 10% of the work. You then have to deal with credentials, separatig sensitive values, deploy your script through CI/CD, handle permissions, build a UI, handle errors and so on.
Windmill is easy to deploy, works out of the box and replaces all of an org's infra.
