Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Performance

Skills this role screens for

About the role

ABOUT THE ROLE Dedalus Labs builds persistent computers for AI agents. Our flagship product, Dedalus Machines, gives agents an isolated environment where they can run software, keep files and state, and work over time. We're looking for an infrastructure engineer who's bothered by a slow build, an unexplained latency spike, or a workflow that makes engineers do the same work twice. You want to understand where the time went. Then you want to fix it, measure the improvement, and make sure everyone who uses that system benefits from it. At a small startup, those details affect how quickly the whole company can move. A build that wastes ten minutes wastes them repeatedly. A confusing API slows every product built on it. A deployment that needs someone to supervise it interrupts work elsewhere. You'll seek out these problems across our systems and codebase, including the ones people have learned to tolerate. Your work can bring product releases and customer commitments forward by weeks, and over time, months. You'll work directly with our CTO and engineers, with substantial freedom to investigate, experiment, and choose an approach. We want someone who takes pride in the craft of software engineering and cares about the systems they'll leave for the next person. That means useful abstractions, clear failure behavior, tests that establish the right guarantees, and documentation that explains the decisions. Your primary responsibility is the team's development speed: the systems that let engineers build, test, deploy, and operate their work. That includes production release pipelines and infrastructure when improving them helps the team deliver reliably. WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON Make the development loop faster. Profile builds, tests, CI queues, artifact transfers, and local workflows. Find repeated work, unnecessary dependencies, poor scheduling, and cache misses. Follow a bottleneck into a compiler, linker, filesystem, network, or upstream dependency when the evidence takes you there. Establish a baseline, make the change, and verify the result on a representative workload. You'll use and improve our open-source tooling: Bessemer (BSMR) https://github.com/dedalus-labs/bsmr, our build system, and Hollywood https://github.com/dedalus-labs/hollywood, which generates GitHub Actions from typed TypeScript definitions and runs actions locally. This includes working on the tools themselves when their implementation limits what we can do. Experience with Buck2, Bazel, Blaze, remote execution, or build cache design is particularly relevant. Build platforms other engineers can build on. Design APIs, controllers, CLIs, and services that support multiple internal products and consumers. Think through resource lifecycles, concurrency, cancellation, permissions, and failure reporting. Work with the engineers using those interfaces, understand their constraints, and make common operations straightforward without hiding important system behavior. Make delivery reliable and understandable. Improve CI/CD, GitOps, environment provisioning, staging, production rollout, and recovery. Connect the source change, build inputs, artifact, and running software so engineers can trace a release and diagnose a failure. Instrument the path with useful metrics, logs, and traces. Use incidents and recurring manual work to identify what needs a software fix. Build and operate fast infrastructure. Set up and improve Linux servers, containers, virtual machines, and Kubernetes environments. Work through capacity, networking, load balancing, resource limits, observability, and recovery. Measure throughput and tail latency under representative load, then follow the bottleneck until you understand it. Work with hardware we control. We have an in-office homelab where we test and debug on real machines and networks we control. Depending on your strengths, you can help assemble, provision, and maintain machines, configure networking, and build test infrastructure so