About Runnel Labs
We had each built the same job queue twice
Runnel Labs is 23 people working remotely across eleven time zones, from Lisbon to Auckland. We make one product, and most of us were its users before we worked here.
Why we built it
Background work deserves better than a cron box
Elif Sarıkaya, Marcus Webb and Nadia Brennan met in 2021 on the platform team of a payments company, where a third of their incidents came from background work: a retry that charged a card twice, a nightly job that had quietly stopped in March, a queue that filled up because one customer imported a million rows. Between them they had built the same retry loop, the same "stuck jobs" table and the same cron box at four different companies.
They started Runnel Labs in September 2022 to build that layer once, properly, as a product. The first version was a TypeScript library and a dashboard, used by six companies the founders knew. Workflows followed in 2023, the Python and Go SDKs in 2024 and 2026, and Runnel Server, the self-hosted edition, was published as open source in 2024.
We are funded by a seed round from two small funds and by our customers, and we intend to stay a company that makes one thing well. Most of the team writes code, all of us take a turn in support, and every engineer joins the on-call rota after their first three months.
- people in 11 time zones
- 23
- founded, by three platform engineers
- 2022
- teams running jobs on Runnel Cloud
- 2,600
- of overlap a day, by design
- 4 h
How we work
Boring on purpose
Runnel sits under other people’s payments and patient reminders. We choose well-understood technology, ship in small releases and treat a surprising behaviour as a bug, even when it is documented.
Write it down
We are remote across eleven time zones, so decisions live in written proposals, not in meetings. Anyone can comment on any proposal, and the reasoning stays findable for the next person.
Everyone does support
Every person at Runnel Labs, the founders included, answers support for one day a fortnight. It is the fastest way we know to find out what is confusing.
Leave a way out
Your jobs are your code, Runnel Server is open source and every run can be exported through the API. We want customers to stay because it works, not because leaving is hard.
Some of the team
Eight of the twenty-three. The rest are probably reviewing a pull request.
Elif Sarıkaya
Co-founder, CEO · Lisbon
Marcus Webb
Co-founder, CTO · Bristol
Nadia Brennan
Co-founder, head of product · Dublin
Ravi Chandran
Engineering lead, Runnel Cloud · Toronto
Ingrid Solberg
Engineer, Python and Go SDKs · Oslo
Tunde Adeyemi
Engineer, workflows engine · Lagos
Clara Neumann
Developer experience and docs · Leipzig
Matiu Parata
Support engineer · Auckland
Open roles
Fully remote, anywhere between UTC−5 and UTC+3, with four hours of overlap a day. Every listing has its salary range, and we pay the same range wherever you live.
Engineering2 roles
- Senior engineer, workflows engine (Rust and Postgres)
Remote, UTC−5 to UTC+3 · Full-time
- Engineer, TypeScript SDK and CLI
Remote, UTC−5 to UTC+3 · Full-time
Customer engineering1 role
- Solutions engineer
Remote, Europe · Full-time