Software Engineer - Compute & Isolation

About the role

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-series-f/, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

Every agent on Baseten Sandboxes gets its own microVM, where it writes and runs code, calls tools, and keeps state across long tasks. Agents pause and resume constantly, so the machine underneath has to start, stop, snapshot, fork, and resume fast, and keep every tenant isolated while it does. General-purpose virtualization was not built for that workload.

The Agent Infra team builds that layer. Sandboxes run in microVMs with custom Linux kernels on bare-metal servers we operate. You'll own how sandboxes start, stop, snapshot, fork, and resume, and how they perform on each host's CPU and memory, down to the hardware. You'll also own the guest and host side of each sandbox: its identity, how it attaches to different storage classes for performance or capabilities, and the virtual devices that connect it securely to the network. In September 2026, Baseten acquired Blaxel https://www.baseten.co/blog/blaxel-is-joining-baseten-to-build-the-future-of-agentic-cloud/, whose microVM sandboxes are the foundation for Baseten Sandboxes https://docs.baseten.co/sandboxes.

We are building a cloud, not just using one. That means designing for many tenants from day one and thinking through what each decision means all the way down to the datacenter. The team is small and ownership is big: we ship in weeks and months, not multi-year programs.

If you've worked deep in KVM and Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, or QEMU and want to build the computers AI agents run on, we'd love to talk.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

- Blaxel is joining Baseten to build the future of agentic infrastructure https://www.baseten.co/blog/blaxel-is-joining-baseten-to-build-the-future-of-agentic-cloud/

- Securing the open frontier with NVIDIA OpenShell and Blaxel sandboxes https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-carbon/

- Baseten Sandboxes documentation https://docs.baseten.co/sandboxes

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Own the microVM lifecycle for agent sandboxes: start, stop, suspend, resume, snapshot, and fork

- Build and tune the custom guest kernels sandboxes run on

- Tune host CPU and memory configuration so sandboxes run fast and safely on each type of hardware we operate

- Manage host-level resources and sandbox density on each machine

- Own startup and resume performance end to end, from VM boot or snapshot restore to the first command