Engineer, Systems (Infrastructure)

Adapt • San Francisco, CA

1d • $200,000 - $300,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

We're hiring an engineer to own the computer underneath Adapt. This is infrastructure in service of the product, not infrastructure for its own sake. We are hiring for a systems expert, but all engineers at Adapt are expected to be in service ultimately of the product we’re building and the customers that use it. That means that your focus will always be on world-class systems that power customer workloads. This role's center of gravity is the layer underneath, but it is not a platform team walled off from the product. You'll sit in customer conversations, ship user-facing features, and follow your work all the way out to the people using it. The systems in play: Sandbox: Firecracker-based microVM orchestration with sub-second boots for agents. Storage: Distributed filesystem backed by object storage, allowing concurrent read/write from multiple sandboxes. Infra: Google Cloud Platform, GKE, Kustomize, GitHub Actions, Postgres, Redis, and the tracing and metrics for all of it. Today that stack serves tens of thousands of sandbox sessions a week, enabling LLMs to take on and complete complex tasks for users. But this is just the beginning. We want someone who can sharpen the architecture that got us here and make the calls that take us further.

Requirements

• 4-7+ years of professional engineering experience, with a meaningful chunk of it on infrastructure
• Experience working at an early stage (seed, Series A, Series B) startup, ideally one where the infrastructure was the product (e.g., build platform, CI system, hosting provider, orchestrator, or database)
• Owned a multi-tenant compute or build system where users ran arbitrary code on your machines and you were accountable for isolation, reliability, and cost
• Are the person teammates bring an architecture decision to before they commit to it, and have mentored engineers without holding a manager title
• Strong in at least one systems language (e.g. Rust or Go). We use Rust for performance-oriented services, and Typescript to glue them together.
• Comfortable at the Linux layer: cgroups, namespaces, filesystems, networking. Have read kernel documentation on purpose
• Experience with one major cloud provider (we're on GCP) and Kubernetes as a tool you use directly, not one you hand to a platform team
• Deep familiarity with container and microVM runtimes like gvisor and Firecracker.
• Working fluency in full-stack TypeScript, or the appetite to get there quickly.
• Strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools, models, and infrastructure market evolution
• Have carried a pager for something people depended on, and the system got better because you did
• Ability to break down a complex and large problem into independently shippable solutions
• Care deeply about users: infra work here is judged by how great a customer’s experience is with the product.
• A genuine desire to grow the craft of engineering and product-building, with an eye for the little big details in both architecture and product

Nice To Haves

• In the first 30 days you independently ship requested and impactful changes to the stack with some guidance and direction, and you're in the on-call rotation
• In the next 30 days, you're moving more towards fuller independence, meaningfully contributing to one of sandbox, storage, or and core infra outright, and proposing ideas backed by conviction as to why they're worth investing in (and also shipping them)
• By 90 days, you're building your own ideas, directly closing the loop and establishing new loops with customers, and you're feeling like you're independent and cooking
• After 90 days and beyond, any requisite training wheels are off and you're feeling empowered to own decisions, propose improvements, and you've established a strong customer-centric understanding of the platform we have and how it can be improved.
• Your judgment to raise the bar for the engineers around you.

Responsibilities

• High-quality execution: design, build, instrument, and confidently scale a system, capability, or feature that just works. Deploys, dashboards, runbooks, and the cost line are part of it, not follow-ups.
• Shipping frequently: ship boulders (like features and capabilities), stones (smaller, quality of life improvements), and pebbles (quick fixes and bugs) regularly and consistently.
• Tying infra work to product outcomes: name the customer-visible number a piece of work moves before you start it, and go check it afterward.
• Solving inside the constraints: solve problems by adding resources for your configuration, or solve it inside the constraints we already have for everyone.
• Customer discovery: directly integrate alongside our early customers and the many ahead to understand their pain points of using Adapt and use those to propose and build solutions.
• Strong internal and external communication: write customer-centric blog posts and communicate directly with customers when new capabilities launch and how they can be used and understood.
• Set a high bar: Lead by example. Expect mentorship, but bring a strong default to figuring things out yourself — and be someone the rest of the team learns from.
• Collaboration: work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. Bias toward shipping, together. Work directly with leadership: your manager, our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, and the rest of the leadership team.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
• Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
• Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
• Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
• Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
• A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco — direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed