System Engineer

Build a Linux machine that wakes in milliseconds, remembers everything, and safely runs code you can’t trust.

Own the systems that make it possible.

I’m hiring a Systems Engineer for a small, YC-backed team building persistent computers for AI agents.

They’ve already built their own filesystem and a custom virtual machine monitor based on Cloud Hypervisor. Now they’re tackling what comes next across storage, virtualization, scheduling and recovery.

You could own an entire subsystem, working directly with the CTO and taking it from the first design decision through to production.

How do you preserve state when a machine fails? Keep workloads properly isolated? Find the bottleneck costing milliseconds every time an agent runs?

Those are the kinds of problems you’d spend your time on.

You’ll need depth in operating systems, hypervisors, storage, networking or distributed systems. Experience building substantial software in Rust, Go, C or C++ would fit well.

What matters most is having something you’ve built that you can really get into. What made it difficult? What broke? Which tradeoffs did you make?

Production work, open source, research or a serious independent project all count. Strong early-career engineers are welcome too.

The practical bits:

• San Francisco, five days a week in the office.

• Relocation support: flights and six months’ rent.

• 0.5–1% equity, plus salary and bonus.

• $11m seed funding raised.

It’s early. You’ll have real influence over the architecture, and you’ll need to be comfortable making decisions while things are still taking shape.

If this sounds like your kind of engineering, drop me a message. Tell me about something you’ve built, and I’ll tell you more about the team.