Job description
Tarides is strongly involved in the development of the OCaml compiler and community tooling.
This role involves working on a compiler-focused team across a number of areas. The team worked on adding WASM support to the Js_of_ocaml backend, so OCaml code can now target WASM in the browser and in future WASI runtimes. This work is deployed and being used daily by Tarides customers.
Tarides also heavily contributed to the Multicore OCaml effort. The Multicore OCaml project added native support for scalable concurrency and shared memory parallelism to the OCaml programming language. At its core, Multicore OCaml extends OCaml with effect handlers for expressing scalable concurrency, and a high-performance concurrent garbage collector aimed at responsive networked applications. Multicore OCaml is also the first industrial-strength language to be equipped with an efficient yet modular memory model, allowing high-level local program reasoning while retaining performance.
Support for Multicore OCaml was merged into the OCaml compiler and released as OCaml 5.0 in December of 2022.
Work continues at Tarides to improve the OCaml compiler by helping with maintenance, introducing new features like Immutable Arrays, Memory profiling, WASM and many more.
This is a great opportunity to work with highly experienced compiler developers and to have a positive impact on the OCaml community.
Learn more:
- https://tarides.com/blog/2025-10-10-ocaml-5-4-release-new-features-fixes-and-more/
- https://tarides.com/blog/2025-03-06-feature-parity-series-statmemprof-returns/
- https://tarides.com/blog/2025-02-19-the-first-wasm-of-ocaml-release-is-out/
- https://tarides.com/blog/2025-01-09-ocaml-5-3-features-and-fixes/
- https://tarides.com/blog/2025-04-23-feature-parity-series-restoring-the-msvc-port/
- https://github.com/ocaml-multicore
- https://tarides.com/blog/tag/multicore/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00250
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.11663
- https://kcsrk.info/papers/pldi18-memory.pdf
Responsibilities
- Design and implement features in the OCaml compiler, with a specific focus on the parser and type system
- Provide technical leadership on the OCaml type system and parser
- Interest in compiling languages to new targets like JavaScript and WASM
- Submit pull requests to the OCaml programming language on GitHub, and work with the OCaml core team to get the features merged
- Work with external clients and other teams to gather requirements, develop proposals, design solutions and communicate project statuses
- Communicate with the wider open-source community (discuss, blog posts, meetups, conferences, talks, etc.)
- Ability to work independently towards high level goals and breakdown large technical solutions into deliverable software artefacts
Profile required
(You don’t have to fill 100% of the qualifications to apply.)
We are looking for an experienced (3y+) systems engineer to join our team.
Ideally, you will have:
- Worked on compilers, either on parsing, type checking, or garbage collectors and other runtime systems.
- Previous experience with OCaml/ML type systems, or type systems for functional languages.
- Excellent knowledge of OCaml programming, or an equivalent strongly typed language.
- Experience in analysing benchmarks and application performance
- Track record of building production-quality software
- Demonstrable open source contributions are a plus, but not required
- Good communication skills in English; English is the corporate language
- Experience of working in multidisciplinary teams
Company description
Tarides is an international software company with offices in Cambridge (UK), Paris (France), and Chennai (India), founded in 2018 by pioneers of systems and functional programming. We have a worldwide presence with collaborators working remotely from the US, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and across Europe. We have a solid academic background with connections to the University of Cambridge, Inria, and IIT Madras. Our diverse team of 40+ people performs groundbreaking innovation, feature development, and crucial maintenance of OCaml-based projects.
Tarides was previously part of Station F's Founder program in 2018 and was selected for the “Concours d’Innovation i-Lab,” organised by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation in partnership with Bpifrance.
Tarides was also recognised during the FIC (International Cybersecurity Forum) 2020 fair, the leading European event on cybersecurity. These awards acknowledge the high quality solutions developed by Tarides and emphasise the interest they have gained from the cybersecurity community.
In 2022, OCaml Labs (a spinout from the University of Cambridge) and Segfault Systems (a spinout from IIT-Madras) both joined Tarides, aligning towards a shared goal: empowering developers, communities, and organisations to adopt OCaml as their primary programming experience by providing training, expertise, and development services.