Systems Engineer

The cloud is broken: It’s wasteful, slow, jaw-droppingly expensive, and held together by decade-old abstractions. At Unikraft we’ve rebuilt it from first principles. A millisecond-native, VM-isolated compute platform that runs 100,000+ workloads per server at 10-100× better unit economics.

We’re in production at companies like Netlify, Browser Use, Prisma, Tinyfish, and FlutterFlow. Our team is made up of some of the best systems, performance, and security geeks out there, backed by top investors, with category leaders as customers. We believe a focused team of exceptional people, moving fast with conviction, can make extreme efficiency available to everyone.

What you’ll do and why it’s career defining

You’ll work directly with the founding team on one of the most technically ambitious infrastructure platforms in the world, on components where a saved microsecond or a caught race condition pays off across a hundred thousand instances.

If you love high-performance, low-latency systems at extreme scale and you’re bored of jobs where the hard problems are already solved, this is your playground. Your work will shape how the next generation of developers build, ship, and scale software in the cloud.

What You’ll Own

Core Platform & Infrastructure

• Architect, build, and maintain the core infrastructure powering Unikraft Cloud, both hosted and on-prem.

• Design and implement the platform’s main components at scale with native support for scale-to-zero, autoscaling, and strong isolation.

Performance, Reliability & Hardening

• Optimize for performance, security, and reliability across diverse workloads, from serverless functions and AI agents to remote IDEs and telemetry backends.

• Break the platform before customers can: build the stress harnesses, soak runs, and regression checks that prove our numbers hold under real-world load.

• Hunt down the bugs nobody else can. You’ll find race conditions that show up once in ten thousand boots or identify a leak that appears after a week of uptime. Roadmap & Direction

• Provide input to and help design the platform’s technical roadmap.

• Work hands-on with users and feed what you learn back into the platform.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong proficiency and programming skills in C, with a deep understanding of systems-level programming.

• Experience building and maintaining operating systems, embedded systems, and/or device drivers.

• Familiarity with memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.

• Knowledge of virtualization technologies like QEMU/KVM. Micro-VMMs like Cloud Hypervisor or Firecracker are a plus.

• Solid grasp of Linux (and Linux networking) internals; comfort working close to the kernel a plus.

• Excellent debugging skills, with a systematic, forensic approach to reproducing, isolating, and eliminating failures.

• Experience with gcc, clang, and other C toolchains, build systems, and cross-compilation workflows.

• Experience with Rust a plus.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills — you’re comfortable working across functions and explaining technical details clearly.

Why you will love this team

• World-class engineering: Collaborate with OS veterans, kernel hackers, and distributed systems experts who’ve rebuilt the cloud from scratch.

• Category-defining product: 10ms cold starts, 100K+ VMs per server, 10–100× cost reduction , we are powering the future of FaaS/serverless, AI agents, build pipelines, and observability stacks.

• Zero bureaucracy: Founder-led, product-obsessed, and deeply technical.

• Massive impact: The components you build, tune, and harden run everything our customers ship.

• Remote-first from day one: Work wherever you’re most productive.

• Retreats and More: Fun-focused, in-person team retreats to recharge and build great relationships.

• The Standard Stuff: Competitive salary and opportunities for career development, six weeks of total time off annually, and a generous equipment budget to spend on anything you need to do your best work.

Apply now if you’re excited to build next-gen infrastructure, work hands-on with users, and help define what rock-solid, performant cloud compute looks like in practice.