Software Engineer, Storage Systems (Agent Infra)
About The Position
Baseten's Agent Infra team builds Agent Drive, a distributed filesystem mounted by agent sandboxes over FUSE, and the storage systems beneath it. The role focuses on designing storage for many tenants, with strict isolation and the consistency required by agent workloads, which predominantly involve small files. The work draws on tiered caching, replication, content-addressed data, and Linux filesystem internals. Agent Drive and Blaxel's sandbox technology form the foundation for Baseten Sandboxes following Baseten's acquisition of Blaxel in September 2026. This is a small team with broad ownership and a short shipping cycle. The engineer will build core filesystem and storage features, address correctness across concurrent mounts and failures, improve read and write tail latency, and support sandbox startup and resume performance. The role also includes building durable block storage, operational observability and incident response, and contributing to upstream open-source storage projects.
Requirements
- Strong systems programming background in Go, Rust, and/or C/C++, with comfort reading kernel code.
- Deep understanding of Linux filesystem and storage internals, including VFS, page cache, dentry and inode caches, FUSE, the block I/O stack, fsync semantics, and crash consistency.
- Hands-on experience building distributed storage systems, content-addressable storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure.
- Experience profiling I/O, memory, and RPC bottlenecks and optimizing tail latency in production.
- Ability to debug correctness bugs that arise under concurrency or partial failure.
- Ability to move quickly and own a problem end to end on a small team.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with a distributed filesystem or object store such as JuiceFS, CephFS, or S3-compatible storage, or contributions to those projects.
- Knowledge of consensus and replication protocols, such as Raft, leader leases, and quorum reads.
- Experience with snapshot, clone, and copy-on-write filesystem features.
- Experience operating multi-tenant storage with hard isolation requirements.
- Familiarity with Linux performance tooling such as eBPF, io_uring, perf, ftrace, and blktrace.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement core Agent Drive features, including metadata replication, volume placement, garbage collection, and FUSE client behavior.
- Solve multi-attach correctness challenges, including cache coherency across FUSE mounts of the same drive, dentry and inode invalidation, write ordering, and crash consistency.
- Optimize tail latency on read and write paths, including page cache strategy, writeback, prefetch, and metadata RPC batching.
- Build tenant isolation into the storage layer, including quota enforcement, blast-radius containment, and noisy-neighbor mitigation.
- Own the storage side of sandbox startup and resume performance.
- Build durable block storage for sandboxes alongside other Baseten storage teams.
- Build observability into every layer, handle storage incidents end to end, and turn incidents into permanent fixes.
- Contribute upstream to the open-source storage projects the team builds on.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
- For U.S. employees, 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for the employee and dependents.
- Flexible PTO policy, including a company-wide Winter Break when offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day.
- Paid parental leave.
- Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot.
- For U.S. employees, a company-facilitated 401(k).
- Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering learning and networking opportunities.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Education Level
No Education Listed
