Member of Engineering (Agent Sanboxes)

poolside; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A forward-thinking AI company based in the United Kingdom is seeking an Applied Research Engineer to design and develop a secure sandboxed execution environment for agent technology. This role requires strong programming skills and experience with distributed systems. The company offers fully remote work, flexible hours, and a supportive culture focused on personal and professional growth.

Benefits

Fully remote work & flexible hours

37 days/year of vacation & holidays

Health insurance allowance for you and dependents

Company-provided equipment

Wellbeing, always-be-learning and home office allowances

Frequent team get togethers

Great diverse & inclusive people-first culture

Qualifications

• Prior experience in sandbox techniques and container runtimes is not a requirement.
• Candidates should be self-driven and willing to reprioritize tasks based on project needs.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop a sandboxed execution environment.
• Own the complete development cycle of new features.
• Collaborate with other teams to meet their needs.
• Continuously improve reliability and performance.

Skills

Strong programming skills in either Go, C, C++ or Python

Comfortable with distributed systems

Experience in Kubernetes or similar container/vm orchestration systems

Experience in designing and building distributed systems

Experience in virtualization or container runtime

Experience in building large scale CI/CD platforms

Experience in a fast paced environment

Job description

ABOUT POOLSIDE

In this decade, the world will create artificial intelligence that reaches human level intelligence (and beyond) by combining learning and search. There will only be a small number of companies who will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will determine who survives and wins. These companies will move faster than anyone else. They will attract the world's most capable talent. They will be on the forefront of applied research and engineering at scale. They will create powerful economic engines. They will continue to scale their training to larger & more capable models. They will be given the right to raise large amounts of capital along their journey to enable this.

poolside exists to be one of these companies - to build a world where AI will drive the majority of economically valuable work and scientific progress.

We believe that software development will be the first major capability in neural networks that reaches human-level intelligence because it's the domain where we can combine Search and Learning approaches the best.

At poolside we believe our applied research needs to culminate in products that are put in the hands of people. Today we focus on building for a developer-led increasingly AI-assisted world. We believe that current capabilities of AI lead to incredible tooling that can assist developers in their day to day work. We also believe that as we increase the capabilities of our models, we increasingly empower anyone in the world to be able to build software. We envision a future where not 100 million people can build software but 2 billion people can.

ABOUT OUR TEAM

We are a remote-first team that sits across Europe and North America and comes together once a month in-person for 3 days and for longer offsites twice a year.

Our R&D and production teams are a combination of more research and more engineering-oriented profiles, however, everyone deeply cares about the quality of the systems we build and has a strong underlying knowledge of software development. We believe that good engineering leads to faster development iterations, which allows us to compound our efforts.

ABOUT THE ROLE

You will be part of the Applied Research Engineering group. Your focus will be on the sandboxed Agent execution environment. You will design, develop and operate services and systems that enable running agent sessions in a rich and safe environment at scale. You will also explore and evaluate different isolation techniques. You will bring Poolside’s Agent to new platforms and environments. You will also improve the reliability and performance of the systems behind the execution environment.

Prior experience in sandbox techniques and container runtimes is not a requirement, but it will be highly welcomed. Besides the technical background, we value candidates who can balance between speed and quality, who are self-driven, are willing to reprioritize works based on evolving project needs, and can distinguish between high impact tasks and trivial optimizations.

YOUR MISSION

Deliver a secure, reliable and performant sandboxed Agent execution environment to meet both the research and product needs atside.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and develop a sandboxed execution environment to facilitate Agent research and product development at poolside.
• Own the complete development cycle of new features and capabilities in the Agent execution environment.
• Collaborate with other teams to discuss, guide and meet their needs in the sandbox and code execution environment.
• Continuously improve reliability and performance of the Agent execution environment.

SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• Strong programming skills in either Go, C, C++ or Python (we are open to polyglot engineers from other languages).
• Comfortable with distributed systems. Or have a good reason to be uncomfortable with them. We'd love to hear your battle scars.
• Plus: Experience in Kubernetes or similar container/vm orchestration systems. Familiarity with public clouds like AWS, GCP, etc.
• Plus: Experience in designing and building distributed systems.
• Plus: Experience in virtualization or container runtime.
• Plus: Experience in building large scale CI/CD platforms.
• Plus: Experience in a fast paced environment.

PROCESS

• Intro call with a member of Applied Research Engineering
• Technical Interview part 1
• Technical Interview part 2
• People Interview
• Final Interview

BENEFITS

• Fully remote work & flexible hours
• 37 days/year of vacation & holidays
• Health insurance allowance for you and dependents
• Company-provided equipment
• Wellbeing, always-be-learning and home office allowances
• Frequent team get togethers
• Great diverse & inclusive people-first culture