1,560 karma · joined July 19, 2009
CTO and Co-founder @ Tower.dev
Former Engineering Leader @ Snowflake
Former CTO and Co-founder @ Reflect (acquired, Puppet)
Former Director of Engineering @ Puppet
brad.heller@gmail.com / brad@tower.dev
hey bud your bias is showing
Forecasted month end $18,729,381,032,152.4
Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.
Tower is a Python-native serverless data platform. Data teams write plain Python, and we handle packaging, dependency resolution, scheduling, and execution across a serverless runtime built on Apache Iceberg. There's no clusters to manage, no YAML to write, no pipelines to rewrite to fit someone else's engine. If you've ever wanted your local Python script to just run in production at scale without a Databricks detour, that's the product.
We're a small, senior team split between London and Berlin. We've built a lot of tech: Custom run dispatch service, multi-region routing, storage based on Apache Iceberg, and the runtime itself, to name a few. This is deep systems work--things like scheduling, distributed execution, and performance. We're not gluing SaaS together.
Stack: Go and Rust for the platform, Python everywhere it matters, Kubernetes (EKS + Karpenter) on AWS, RDS Postgres, ElastiCache Redis, S3/Iceberg, WorkOS for auth.
Looking for:
* strong distributed-systems fundamentals
* comfort owning a system end to end
* taste for correctness under load
Bonus: data-platform, query-engine, or Iceberg experience; async Rust; Kubernetes internals.
Apply / questions: Email in bio — mention HN.
This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech that’s emerging in Europe is dangerous, man.
On the brain drain problem in particular, one way to ensure talent sticks around is to create a good environment for people to do their best work. In much of Europe, getting bureaucracy out of the way and encouraging real investment would go a long way. People leave because they can make more money and they want to be surrounded by the best people. People would trade some of that off to stick around their home countries, however if you go to California and talk to folks from e.g. NL or DE working on this stuff, they have a lot to say about innovation and working culture back home.
Top level: Super excited to witness this in my lifetime.
Edit: Also, my 40 years of life leads me towards the latter category.
Data teams waste countless hours wrestling with infrastructure instead of solving their businesses’ most critical problem: How to get more value from their data. The problem gets even worse with the AI revolution in flight. Tower changes that.
We're a Python-native serverless platform built on Apache Iceberg with powerful ETL and Lakehouse management tools. We integrate seamlessly with enterprise systems and make companies more nimble by letting them choose the best engine for each job while maintaining full data ownership.
We're focused on hiring developers that love the data ecosystem, are interested in really hard distributed systems problems, and working on dev tools.
Send a message to me, the CTO, at brad (at) tower.dev
This is true if you take a very loose definition of "political violence" lol and probably just disingenuous at best.
This outage seems really to be DynamoDB related, so the blast radius in services affected is going to be big. Seems they're still triaging.
Delusionaly generous take. Perhaps even zealotry.