Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Performance

Dedalus Labs, Inc.•San Francisco, CA

2d•$180,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Dedalus builds persistent computers for AI agents. Our product, Dedalus Machines, gives agents an environment where they can run software, keep state, and work over time. We're looking for an infrastructure engineer who's bothered by a slow build, an unexplained latency spike, or a workflow that makes engineers do the same work twice. You want to understand where the time went. Then you want to fix it, measure the improvement, and make sure everyone who uses that system benefits from it. At a small startup, those details affect how quickly the whole company can move. A build that wastes ten minutes wastes them repeatedly. A confusing API slows every product built on it. A deployment that needs someone to supervise it interrupts work elsewhere. You'll seek out these problems across our systems and codebase, including the ones people have learned to tolerate. Your work can bring product releases and customer commitments forward by weeks, and over time, months. You'll work directly with our CTO and engineers, with substantial freedom to investigate, experiment, and choose an approach. We want someone who takes pride in the craft of software engineering and cares about the systems they'll leave for the next person. That means useful abstractions, clear failure behavior, tests that establish the right guarantees, and documentation that explains the decisions.

Requirements

Strong software engineering skills and experience building or operating infrastructure that other people rely on.
Depth in Go, Rust, C++, or another systems language.
Practical Linux debugging.
Thoughtful API design.
Experience with TypeScript.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Buck2, Bazel, Blaze, remote execution, or build cache design.
Build systems, CI/CD, GitOps, Kubernetes, observability, and infrastructure as code.
Familiarity with Terraform.
Hardware and networking expertise.
Experience configuring switches, tracing packet loss, or understanding how a NIC, driver, and application interact.
Knowledge of Ethernet, routing, VLANs, SFP+/QSFP optics and direct-attach cables, RDMA, and RoCE.

Responsibilities

Make the development loop faster. Profile builds, tests, CI queues, artifact transfers, and local workflows. Find repeated work, unnecessary dependencies, poor scheduling, and cache misses. Follow a bottleneck into a compiler, linker, filesystem, network, or upstream dependency when the evidence takes you there. Establish a baseline, make the change, and verify the result on a representative workload.
Use and improve our open-source tooling: Bessemer (BSMR), our build system, and Hollywood, which generates GitHub Actions from typed TypeScript definitions and runs actions locally. This includes working on the tools themselves when their implementation limits what we can do.
Build platforms other engineers can build on. Design APIs, controllers, CLIs, and services that support multiple internal products and consumers. Think through resource lifecycles, concurrency, cancellation, permissions, and failure reporting. Work with the engineers using those interfaces, understand their constraints, and make common operations straightforward without hiding important system behavior.
Make delivery reliable and understandable. Improve CI/CD, GitOps, environment provisioning, staging, production rollout, and recovery. Connect the source change, build inputs, artifact, and running software so engineers can trace a release and diagnose a failure. Instrument the path with useful metrics, logs, and traces. Use incidents and recurring manual work to identify what needs a software fix.
Work with hardware we control. We have an in-office homelab for testing and debugging on real machines and networks. Depending on your strengths, you can help develop its provisioning, networking, and test infrastructure so we can reproduce failures and measure changes under conditions we understand.