Engineer, Systems (Infrastructure)

Adapt.com • San Francisco, CA

2d • $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.
• 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
• Strong in at least one systems language (e.g. Rust or Go).
• Comfortable at the Linux layer: cgroups, namespaces, filesystems, networking.
• Experience with one major cloud provider (GCP preferred) and Kubernetes as a tool you use directly.
• 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.
• Carried a pager for a production system and improved it.
• 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.
• Operated a production system that other people depended on.
• Do not prefer working with a formalized product function or product manager, or expect infra work to arrive as a well-specced ticket.
• Do not draw a line between infrastructure work and product work, or would rather go deep on the system than find out whether it helped anyone.
• Reach for more resources before understanding why the ones you have aren't enough, or would rather add a configuration flag than delete a code path.
• Do not view vibe coding sufficient for building a great product or think that code is a solved problem.
• Review and understand the code that you (or your agent(s)) write and that others on the team write.
• Do not find yourself regularly saying 'it's good enough'.
• Do not find yourself waiting for direction and clarity and enjoy making decisions independently.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Rust for performance-oriented services.
• Experience with Typescript to glue services together.
• Shipped user-facing features.
• Followed work all the way out to the people using it.
• Sharpened architecture and made calls to take systems further.
• Mentored engineers without holding a manager title.
• Read kernel documentation on purpose.
• Used Kubernetes directly, not handed it to a platform team.
• Experience with Frontier AI tools like Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex.
• Experience with Adapt itself.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, instrument, and confidently scale a system, capability, or feature that just works.
• Deploy systems, create dashboards, write runbooks, and manage costs.
• Ship boulders (like features and capabilities), stones (smaller, quality of life improvements), and pebbles (quick fixes and bugs) regularly and consistently.
• Tie infra work to product outcomes by identifying customer-visible metrics before starting work and verifying them afterward.
• Solve problems within existing constraints rather than by adding resources.
• Directly integrate alongside early customers to understand their pain points and propose/build solutions.
• Write customer-centric blog posts and communicate directly with customers about new capabilities.
• Lead by example, mentor others, and figure things out independently.
• Collaborate with the team and leadership in San Francisco.
• Own whole pillars of the platform as the company scales.
• Propose improvements and make decisions independently.
• Raise the bar for engineers around you with your judgment.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires
• Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
• Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals
• Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer
• Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
• Founder-dense, in-person team in 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