--- title: Hiring at Zed: Building in real time — Zed's Blog description: Zed describes its engineering culture and hiring process. The team of 20+ engineers works across rendering, real-time collaboration, and AI in a tightly... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/hiring-at-zed-building-in-real-time-zed-s-blog-xubccb8rk twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Hiring at Zed: Building in real time — Zed's Blog | daily.dev og:description: Zed describes its engineering culture and hiring process. The team of 20+ engineers works across rendering, real-time collaboration, and AI in a tightly... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/hiring-at-zed-building-in-real-time-zed-s-blog-xubccb8rk og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XUbcCB8Rk.png og:image:alt: Hiring at Zed: Building in real time — Zed's Blog og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Hiring at Zed: Building in real time — Zed's Blog **[Zed](https://daily.dev/sources/zed)** · 6 min read · 5 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Zed describes its engineering culture and hiring process. The team of 20+ engineers works across rendering, real-time collaboration, and AI in a tightly integrated Rust codebase approaching one million lines. Less than half of hires came through formal applications — many joined via open source contributions or community engagement. The interview process skips LeetCode in favor of a technical discussion, a Rust pairing session, and a values conversation. Pair programming is the default working mode, using Zed itself with shared buffers and built-in audio. Engineers are expected to reason from first principles, debug across system layers, and engage with performance constraints from day one. AI work at Zed focuses on live editor state rather than static snapshots, built on DeltaDB which tracks operational history of code evolution. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Zed is 1.0 — Zed's Blog](https://daily.dev/posts/zed-is-1-0-zed-s-blog-fifbclpa0) · Zed · 14 upvotes · 1 comments - [Zed Guild: What We Built, What We Learned — Zed's Blog](https://daily.dev/posts/zed-guild-what-we-built-what-we-learned-zed-s-blog-yofpmqrd5) · Zed · 53 upvotes · 6 comments - [Hands-on with Zed: The IDE built for AI](https://daily.dev/posts/hands-on-with-zed-the-ide-built-for-ai-orymaboxm) · InfoWorld · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#zed](https://daily.dev/tags/zed) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/hiring-at-zed-building-in-real-time-zed-s-blog-xubccb8rk) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Hiring at Zed: Building in real time — Zed's Blog","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/hiring-at-zed-building-in-real-time-zed-s-blog-xubccb8rk","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/hiring-at-zed-building-in-real-time-zed-s-blog-xubccb8rk"},"datePublished":"2026-03-20T15:42:48.075Z","dateModified":"2026-03-20T15:43:21.226Z","description":"Zed describes its engineering culture and hiring process. 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