Staff Engineer, AI Inference & Distributed Systems

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 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