About Tend

Tend started in 2020 when Marcus Delacroix-Oyelaran, then the only backend engineer at a small logistics startup, discovered that the company's nightly reports had silently stopped running eleven days earlier. The cron server had been rebuilt during a migration and nobody had put the crontab back. Nobody noticed until a customer asked where their numbers were.

He spent the next several months writing down what a job scheduler should guarantee: that a job runs when it was told to, that a failure is retried sensibly instead of hammering a struggling server, that two jobs which must not overlap do not overlap, and that a human can always find out what happened. Three former colleagues joined to build it, and the first customers came from the same mailing lists where people complain about cron.

Today Tend is a fully remote team of 38 people, with our legal headquarters in Denver, Colorado. We run scheduling infrastructure in four regions and process several billion job runs a year. We keep the product deliberately narrow: schedules, delayed jobs, retries, concurrency limits, and signed deliveries. We would rather do those five things thoroughly than add a sixth thing badly.

We write documentation as if it were the product, because for most of our users it is. Error codes are stable and documented, changes to the API are versioned by date, and we publish postmortems for every incident that affects customers, including the embarrassing ones. If you find something unclear, that is a bug, and support@tendcomputer.com will treat it as one.

Team

• Marcus Delacroix-Oyelaran

  Co-founder and CEO

  Marcus wrote the first version of Tend's scheduler in a rented Denver coworking space in 2020. He still reviews every postmortem before it is published and has strong opinions about the phrase "root cause".

• Ingrid Halvorsen

  Co-founder and CTO

  Ingrid spent nine years building queueing systems at a payments company before joining Tend. She designed the lease-based scheduler that guarantees each cron fire happens exactly once per schedule.

• Tomás Aguirre-Bell

  Head of Developer Experience

  Tomás leads the SDKs, the documentation, and the API design review process. He maintains the Go SDK personally and has been known to reject a pull request over a comma in an error message.

• Naledi Mokoena

  VP of Engineering

  Naledi runs the platform, reliability, and security teams, and owns the on-call rotation. Before Tend she operated large-scale batch systems at a European telecom and remains unimpressed by dashboards that are always green.

• Desmond Achterberg

  Head of Customer Success

  Desmond leads the support and solutions engineers who answer the emails sent to support@tendcomputer.com. He reads a random sample of tickets every Friday and keeps a running list of the docs pages that caused them.