- Scanner is a petabyte-scale log search and storage tool, positioned as a 'diet Splunk'—10x cheaper and significantly faster, but with fewer long-tail features.
- Initially targeting DevOps, Scanner pivoted to security due to the critical need for log retention in security operations, unlike DevOps where logs can be discarded to save costs.
- The company is seed-stage, venture-backed, with an 8-person team, and is experiencing growth with increasing customer demand.
- Scanner's speed advantage comes from leveraging cloud elasticity—using S3 for storage and spinning up thousands of compute cores on demand for queries, avoiding the cost of idle compute.
- The system makes unique technical trade-offs, such as coarse-grained indexing optimized for S3's latency characteristics, and avoids traditional database features like ACID compliance since logs are append-only.
- Scanner's backend is entirely built in Rust, chosen for its performance, fine-grained control over memory, and safety features, despite some complexities with async programming.
- The team culture emphasizes kindness, empathy, and good-faith collaboration, enabling creative problem-solving without bureaucratic overhead.
- Scanner is hiring, prioritizing senior engineers with deep technical expertise in areas like database internals, networking, and low-level optimizations.
- Compensation is competitive, with most employees earning more in cash than at their previous jobs, though equity and benefits are balanced against startup realities.
- The company operates on a hybrid model, with one mandatory office day per week to foster collaboration, while remaining flexible for remote work.