Member of Technical Staff - Sailboxes

Sail Research Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free meals

Studio Display at desk

Coffee variety in office

Cat named Coco in office

Job summary

Sail is building the world's most efficient software for inference and agent hosting. In this role, you'll be one of the first engineers on Sailboxes, contributing across the stack—from low-level performance work on our custom networking stack to building large-scale systems that maximize efficiency.

You'll focus on distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and scalable, ergonomic tooling. The SF office offers a collaborative environment with generous equipment and setup to accelerate

Qualifications

• Strong distributed systems fundamentals (concurrency, networking, databases, performance engineering).
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure), container orchestration, and/or multi-cloud networking.
• Product-focused approach to platform work and robust, scalable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Dig into the guts of our custom FirecrackerVM fork to extract every ounce of performance possible from our platform.
• Model historic usage patterns and implement scheduling algorithms that maximize fleet utilization and autoscale intelligently while minimizing latency.
• Design and implement highly-available distributed systems to handle millions of operations per second.
• Build deep monitoring tooling and features that make Sailboxes the most delightful experience for both humans and agents alike.
• Own future product directions for Sailboxes (Windows/Mac sandboxes, high-efficiency storage, etc.).

Skills

Distributed systems

Concurrency

Networking

Databases

Performance engineering

Cloud infrastructure

Container orchestration

Multi-cloud networking

Product-focused platform work

FirecrackerVMs

Tools

FirecrackerVMs

Job description

Sail builds the world's most efficient software for inference (processing LLM tokens) and agent hosting (cloud VMs). Together, our technologies allow our customers to deploy AI agents at large scale to do the most challenging work.

In this role, you'll focus on Sailboxes, our cost-efficient CPU sandbox for long-horizon agents. You’ll be one of the first engineers on a rapidly growing product-line and write code at every part of the agent runtime, from low-level performance work on our custom networking stack to building large scale systems that maximize our efficiency.

What you’ll do

• Dig into the guts of our custom FirecrackerVM fork to extract every ounce of performance possible from our platform.

• Model historic usage patterns and implement scheduling algorithms that maximize our fleet utilization and autoscale intelligently while minimizing latency.

• Design and implement highly-available distributed systems to handle millions of operations per second.

• Build deep monitoring tooling and features that make Sailboxes the most delightful experience for both humans and agents alike.

• Own future product directions for Sailboxes (Windows/Mac sandboxes, high-efficiency storage, etc.).

What we’re looking for

• Strong distributed systems fundamentals (concurrency, networking, databases, performance engineering). Ideally experience building and maintaining software for large-scale production distributed systems.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure), container orchestration, and/or multi-cloud networking.

• You take a product-focused approach to platform work and care deeply about building solutions that are robust, scalable, and ergonomic for users.

• Bonus: experience with FirecrackerVMs.

Interview process

1. Meet the CTO, who will ask about your experience and share as much detail about Sail as you want to hear.

2. A technical interview with one of our Sailbox engineers. This will also be an opportunity to ask any questions about the Sailbox product and team.

3. Come in to Sail's SF office for an interview day. Meet the whole team, then you'll have 3-4 hours to design and implement a solution to a problem that closely simulates the work we do daily. AI assistance is highly encouraged, and we'll provide a laptop with all the best tools set up. Finish with a short presentation describing your process, learnings, and results.

4. Offer. Once the team decides we want to work with you, we make a strong offer quickly and will be quite persistent over email/text/calls :)

Life at Sail

We work out of a beautiful, sunny office in downtown San Francisco. All meals are on us (and actually great; SF is a food paradise and it would be a shame to eat only bowl slop). Everyone gets a Studio Display at their desk. We are serious about investing in anything that saves us time or energy. There are six different ways to make coffee or tea in the office. A friendly (hypoallergenic) black cat named Coco visits occasionally.