Virtualization / Compute Systems Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $250K – $300K • 0.1% – 0.5%

Employment Type: FullTime

The role

We're looking for a Compute Software Engineer to build and own our virtualization layer—a critical component of Blaxel's AI-native cloud infrastructure. You'll work on our fork of Firecracker, the open-source microVM technology, extending and optimizing it to power the fastest serverless compute platform for agentic AI workloads.

This is a foundational role where you'll architect and implement core virtualization primitives that enable sub-25ms cold starts, secure multi-tenant isolation, and efficient resource management at scale.

What you'll do

• Design and build low-level virtualization features on our Firecracker fork, including VM lifecycle management, memory optimization, and I/O performance improvements

• Develop kernel-level optimizations and custom device models to minimize latency and maximize throughput for AI workloads

• Build monitoring, observability, and debugging tools for production virtualization infrastructure

• Work closely with the platform team to integrate the virtualization layer with our control plane and orchestration systems

• Contribute upstream to Firecracker and engage with the open-source community

• Profile and optimize critical paths in the VM creation and execution pipeline

• Handle production incidents and drive continuous reliability improvements

Who you are

You're a systems engineer who thrives on building high-performance infrastructure from first principles. You care deeply about latency, efficiency, and correctness. You're comfortable reading kernel code, debugging at the hardware level, and making architectural tradeoffs that impact the entire stack.

Required skills

• Strong proficiency in Rust and/or C/C++

• Deep understanding of Linux internals, particularly KVM, virtio, and kernel memory management

• Experience with virtualization technologies (QEMU, Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, or similar)

• Solid grasp of systems performance analysis and optimization techniques

• Ability to read and debug low-level code across kernel and userspace boundaries

Preferred

• Prior experience contributing to Firecracker, QEMU, or other VMM projects

• Experience building production infrastructure at scale

• Familiarity with eBPF, io_uring, or other modern Linux performance features

• Knowledge of hardware virtualization extensions (Intel VT-x, AMD-V)

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud orchestration

Bonus

• Active contributions to open-source virtualization or systems projects

• Experience with ARM virtualization or multi-architecture support

• Background in security research or vulnerability mitigation in virtualized environments

• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure or GPU virtualization

About Blaxel

Blaxel is AWS for AI agents. We’re building a new kind of cloud optimized for agentic AI—powered by a purpose-built 25ms cold-start serverless compute engine.

We process billions of AI agent requests and power the production infrastructure for top AI startups. Traditional clouds weren’t built for agentic workloads—we’re solving the performance, reliability, and stateful execution challenges they can’t.

We recently raised a $7.3M seed round led by First Round Capital.