Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Performance

The posting, as Dedalus Labs, Inc. wrote it

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 deli
[…]
can come from the same project. Choose work you already have. We are not asking you to build a new project for this application.

• Work: Show the code, demo, design, or result. Explain what you personally owned, what you reused, and one decision that made the result better or simpler.
• Investigation: Describe the symptom, your first explanation, the evidence that changed your thinking, and how you established the result. Include the workload or users involved and any important limitations.
• Writing: Share one piece of writing you care about as a separate, required sample. Any medium or length is welcome. Tell us why you wrote it, who it was for, and what you wanted to communicate. Looking back, what works well and what would you change? We care about the quality of your thinking and writing, and your reflection on the work. Link it or paste a redacted excerpt. Explain your contribution and any coauthors or AI assistance.

Work from employment, open source, research, coursework, or independent projects is welcome. Public source code is optional. A redacted excerpt or a concrete account of private work is fine. Keep confidential information out of your application.

Tell us which problem in this role you want to own and why. If your strongest evidence is easy to miss on a resume, point us to it. An existing demo or short screen recording is welcome, and video is optional.

For this role, a useful example might be a build you made faster, an unreliable deployment you repaired, or an internal tool other engineers adopted. Explain how you separated the cause from the symptoms, what you chose to leave alone, and what happened after people started using the change.

You can explore Bessemer (BSMR) https://github.com/dedalus-labs/bsmr and Hollywood https://github.com/dedalus-labs/hollywood to understand some of our work. Contributions are optional. If you want to contribute, discuss the problem and scope with the maintainers first. Existing work is equally welcome.