Systems Engineer

The cloud is broken: It's wasteful, slow, awfully expensive, and burdened with legacy tech that wasn't built for today's workloads. At Unikraft we're building a generational, truly millisecond-native, extremely scalable cloud platform that provides exponentially higher efficiency. Are you bored with your current job? Want to push the boundaries of what's possible in the cloud to the absolute limit?

Our team consists of some of the best systems, performance, and security geeks out there, and is backed by top investors with category leaders as our customers. We believe a focused team of exceptional people, moving fast with conviction, can rebuild the cloud from first principles and make extreme efficiency (eg, millions of users on a few servers) available to everyone

What You’ll Do

• Architect, build, and maintain the core infrastructure powering Unikraft Cloud—both hosted and on-prem.
• Design and implement the platform’s main components at scale (think: 100,000+ instances per server) with native support for scale-to-zero, autoscaling, and strong isolation.
• Optimize for performance, security, and reliability across diverse workloads—from serverless functions and AI agents to remote IDEs and telemetry backends.
• Provide input to and help design the platform’s technical roadmap

What We’re Looking For

• Strong proficiency and programming skills in C, with a deep understanding of systems-level programming.
• Experience building and maintaining operating systems, embedded systems and/or device drivers.
• Familiarity with memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Knowledge of virtualization technologies like QEMU/KVM. Micro-VMMs like Cloud Hypervisor or Firecracker are a plus.
• Solid grasp of Linux (and Linux networking) internals and comfort working close to the kernel a plus.
• Excellent debugging skills.
• Experience with gcc, clang, and other C toolchains, build systems, and cross-compilation workflows.
• Experience with Rust a plus.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills — you’re comfortable working across functions and explaining technical details clearly

Mindset

• Eagerness to learn and take on new challenges.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a curious, analytical mindset.
• Enthusiasm for building reliable, high-performance systems.
• Team player with good communication skills.
• Ability to quickly adapt to new programming languages, runtimes and environments.

Why This Role is Career-Defining

Unikraft isn’t just another cloud infra startup: we’re building what the cloud should have been from the start. You’ll be working on one of the most technically ambitious infrastructure platforms in the world. If you’re passionate about high performance, high scalability, low-latency systems, this is your playground. Your work will shape how the next generation of developers build, ship, and scale software in the cloud.

Why You’ll Love This Team

• World-class engineering : Collaborate with OS veterans, kernel hackers, and distributed systems experts.
• Speed x Focus : We move fast, iterate hard, and ship real impact weekly.
• Zero bureaucracy : Founder-led, product-obsessed, and deeply technical.
• Massive impact : Our infra powers the future of FaaS/serverless, AI agents, build pipelines, observability stacks, and more.

Benefits

• Remote-first from day one — work wherever you’re most productive.
• Competitive salary and opportunities for career development.
• Six weeks of total time off for you to use through the year.
• A generous equipment budget to spend on anything you need to do your best work.
• Fun-focused, in-person team retreats to recharge and build great relationships

Apply now if you’re excited to build next-gen infrastructure, work hands-on with users, and help define what performant cloud compute looks like in practice