Software Engineer, Compute London

vercel.com; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Healthcare

Mentorship & events

Flexible time off

WFH budget

Job summary

Vercel is seeking a Software Engineer for the Persistence team in London, working on scalable compute infrastructure. The role focuses on Go development, low-level storage and state management within Hive, and improving cluster reliability across multiple regions.

You will build and operate distributed systems with a strong emphasis on performance and reliability, and collaborate with teams across the compute division.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with Golang strongly preferred.
• Deep experience with virtual machines, file systems and Linux.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale; design for performance and reliability.
• Experience with schedulers and orchestrators for managing containers and non-containerised workloads (e.g. Nomad, Kubernetes).
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Manage and improve our fleet of clusters, running 100s of instances across regions.
• Write Golang daily and use Terraform to provision infrastructure; know Nomad as the scheduler.
• Rethink primitives of our infrastructure — virtual filesystems, Linux primitives, and low-level virtualization.
• Own reliability and performance of the compute platform; provide on-call coverage.
• Collaborate across teams to drive convergence of compute at Vercel.

Skills

Golang

Distributed systems

Linux internals

Virtual machines

On-call ops

Kubernetes

Nomad

Tools

Terraform

Nomad

Kubernetes

Job description

About Vercel:

Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company. We free people and agents to ship what’s next.

For more than a decade, Vercel has shaped how the web is built. As the team behind Next.js, v0, and AI SDK, we create products that help builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.

Now, software is entering a new era, and the next generation of products will not just be used by people. They will be built, extended, and operated by agents.

We are building the platform for that future, trusted by companies like OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide. Whether you’re building our products, supporting our customers, growing our community, or shaping our story, you’ll help define what comes next.

About the role:

Developers are building faster than ever. Humans and agents are deploying more than 6 million times a day on Vercel, spinning up over 2 million Sandboxes and serving a trillion requests per month. Every single one is powered by our own compute infrastructure.

The Persistence team sits within Vercel's Compute division. This team owns the deep infrastructure within Hive (our compute platform) focussing on storage and state for all our workloads (Builds, Sandboxes and Functions). This work is redefining compute with features like Fluid Compute, Persistent Sandboxes, and Custom Images.

As a Software Engineer on the Persistence team, you'll work on the infrastructure that runs 100s of instances across every region where our customers deploy code, rethinking low-level primitives and contributing to platform features that improve the experience for thousands of developers every day.

This role is based in London, UK. If you're within commuting distance of our London office, the role includes in-office anchor days. If you're located further afield within the UK, the role is fully remote. For location-specific details, please connect with our recruiting team.

What you will do:

• Manage and improve our fleet of clusters, running 100s of instances deployed in every region where our customers deploy and run their code.
• Write Golang on a daily basis and use Terraform to provision infrastructure; you'll get to know Nomad as our scheduler for managing workloads.
• Rethink the primitives of our infrastructure — working with virtual filesystems, Linux primitives, and low-level virtualisation.
• Own the reliability and performance of our compute platform, including on-call coverage for a team where every improvement has outsized impact at scale.
• Collaborate across teams to drive the convergence of all compute at Vercel.

About you:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with Golang strongly preferred.
• Deep experience with virtual machines, file systems and Linux — you like knowing how things work under the hood (tcpdump, strace, and iptables are familiar tools).
• Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale; you design for performance and reliability.
• Experience with schedulers and orchestrators for managing containers and non-containerised workloads (e.g. Nomad, Kubernetes).
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, with a genuine enthusiasm for digging into problems that don't have obvious solutions.

Bonus if you:

• Have worked on low-level virtualisation or sandbox execution environments.
• Have product engineering experience and care about the developer-facing impact of infrastructure decisions.
• Have experience with on-call operations for large-scale distributed systems.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.