Dedalus Labs
Systems Engineer
New
150000 –250000 USD / yearUSAdistributed systemsvirtualizationnetworkingstorageperformance engineering
Develop and optimize low-level distributed systems infrastructure for AI agents focusing on performance, reliability, and scalability.
Nice to have
- Experience with Kubernetes or modern cloud infrastructure.
- Experience building distributed systems in industry, research, or open source.
- Familiarity with distributed storage systems.
- Understanding of consistency models and consensus.
- Experience with virtualization, containers, hypervisors, or Firecracker.
- Kernel, operating systems, or low-level runtime experience.
- Contributions to systems-focused open source projects.
- Experience with performance engineering and systems optimization.
- Background in systems research, networking, databases, distributed computing, or related fields.
- Experience operating production infrastructure at scale.
Other
- Only candidates who filled out our form above will be considered.
- Dedalus Labs is an AI research neolab building infrastructure for AI agents.
- We’re building the persistent compute layer that powers the next generation of autonomous software. Our platform spans virtualization, distributed systems, storage, networking, orchestration, and low-level runtime infrastructure. Every millisecond, every sys-call, every scheduling decision matters.
- We’re looking for systems engineers who enjoy understanding computers all the way down.
- Think abstractions are useful because you understand what’s underneath them.
- Care about latency, throughput, memory usage, and tail performance.
- Enjoy debugging problems that take days to understand and minutes to fix.
- Believe reliability is a feature.
- Think distributed systems are fun rather than frightening.
- Get excited reading kernel commits, infrastructure blogs, or systems papers.
- Have strong opinions about operating systems, virtualization, networking, or storage.
- Like making difficult systems feel simple.
- Measure before optimizing, then optimize relentlessly.
- View performance engineering as product engineering.
- Believe the best infrastructure disappears into the background.
- Are high agency and fiercely independent.
- Say how things ought to be built, then build them.
- Are a competitive teammate with a heart of gold.
- Are hungry to learn, improve, and reflect deeply on feedback.
- Go above and beyond in everything you do.
- Distributed infrastructure for large-scale agent workloads.
- Virtualization and sandboxing systems.
- Persistent compute and storage primitives.
- Scheduling, orchestration, and reliability systems.
- Runtime infrastructure for long-running AI agents.
- Internal developer platforms and tooling.
- Production systems operating under real-world scale, latency, and reliability constraints.
- You might find yourself working on problems like:
- Building a distributed storage layer for persistent agent state.
- Improving sandbox startup latency from seconds to milliseconds.
- Designing scheduling systems that efficiently allocate compute across thousands of concurrent agents.
- Developing virtualization and isolation technologies for secure multi-tenant workloads.
- Profiling bottlenecks across networking, storage, scheduling, and runtime layers.
- Building developer infrastructure that makes deploying and operating AI agents dramatically simpler.
- Fluency in Rust (preferred), Go, C/C++, or similar systems languages.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals.
- Good understanding of operating systems, distributed systems, or networking concepts.
- Ability to reason about performance, reliability, concurrency, and debugging.
- Comfortable navigating large systems with many moving parts.
- High agency and excellent engineering judgment.
- Strong communication and collaborative instincts.
- You know the difference between software that merely works and software that feels inevitable.
- You care about elegant abstractions, good engineering judgment, and building systems that other engineers love using.
- In person in San Francisco.
- Relocation support available.
- We sponsor visas.
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
- Meals and office benefits included.
- The first thing we look at is your GitHub.
- Show us systems you’ve built. Open-source contributions. Research. Infrastructure projects. Kernel patches. Homelabs. Performance investigations. Technical writing.
- We care far more about what you’ve built than how many years you’ve been building.