Systems Engineer

Every company will have a central company agent. Adapt is the platform for building, running, and governing it. We connect the models a company chooses to its systems, data, people, and workflows. With persistent memory, secure compute, deep integrations, reusable skills, and enterprise controls, Adapt helps the agent understand real context, complete real work, and improve over time.

We believe this infrastructure should be open, portable, secure, and controlled by the organizations that depend on it. Models will change. What a company builds with Adapt stays theirs. Join us in building the platform that will define how companies work with AI.

About the role

We're hiring an engineer to own the computer underneath Adapt. This is infrastructure in service of the product, not infrastructure for its own sake.

We are hiring for a systems expert, but all engineers at Adapt are expected to be in service ultimately of the product we’re building and the customers that use it. That means that your focus will always be on world-class systems that power customer workloads. This role's center of gravity is the layer underneath, but it is not a platform team walled off from the product. You'll sit in customer conversations, ship user-facing features, and follow your work all the way out to the people using it.

The systems in play:

• Sandbox: Firecracker-based microVM orchestration with sub-second boots for agents.
• Storage: Distributed filesystem backed by object storage, allowing concurrent read/write from multiple sandboxes.
• Infra: Google Cloud Platform, GKE, Kustomize, GitHub Actions, Postgres, Redis, and the tracing and metrics for all of it.

Today that stack serves tens of thousands of sandbox sessions a week, enabling LLMs to take on and complete complex tasks for users. But this is just the beginning. We want someone who can sharpen the architecture that got us here and make the calls that take us further.

About you

Years aren't all equal (startup years are like dog years, as an example) and they're not the best predictor of success. That being said, you probably exhibit most of these characteristics:

• 4-7+ years of professional engineering experience, with a meaningful chunk of it on infrastructure
• Experience working at an early stage (seed, Series A, Series B) startup, ideally one where the infrastructure was the product. A build platform, CI system, hosting provider, orchestrator, or database
• You've owned a multi-tenant compute or build system where users ran arbitrary code on your machines and you were accountable for isolation, reliability, and cost
• You're the person teammates bring an architecture decision to before they commit to it, and you've mentored engineers without holding a manager title
• Strong in at least one systems language (e.g. Rust or Go). We use Rust for performance-oriented services, and Typescript to glue them together.
• Comfortable at the Linux layer: cgroups, namespaces, filesystems, networking. You've read kernel documentation on purpose
• Experience with one major cloud provider (we're on GCP) and Kubernetes as a tool you use directly, not one you hand to a platform team
• Deep familiarity with container and microVM runtimes like gvisor and Firecracker.
• Working fluency in full-stack TypeScript, or the appetite to get there quickly. You will ship in the product too
• Strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools, models, and infrastructure market evolution
• You've carried a pager (maybe not literally) for something people depended on, and the system got better because you did
• Ability to break down a complex and large problem into independently shippable solutions (you may have found yourself saying "What's the simplest thing we can do to try to solve this problem?")
• Care deeply about users: infra work here is judged by how great a customer’s experience is with the product.
• A genuine desire to grow the craft of engineering and product-building (you could call it "taste"), with an eye for the little big details in both architecture and product

How you'll be successful

As an engineer at Adapt, you own systems end-to-end from the customer Slack thread, through architecture and shipping, all the way to the launch blog post (we call it "ship and tell"). Your job isn't done until customers love what you built. As we scale, you'll own whole pillars of the platform. Concretely, you're responsible for:

• High-quality execution. This is the central responsibility of any engineer: you design, build, instrument, and confidently scale a system, capability, or feature that just works. Deploys, dashboards, runbooks, and the cost line are part of it, not follow-ups.
• Shipping frequently. You ship boulders (like features and capabilities), stones (smaller, quality of life improvements), and pebbles (quick fixes and bugs) regularly and consistently. Infra is no excuse for long dark stretches.
• Tying infra work to product outcomes. You can name the customer-visible number a piece of work moves before you start it, and you go check it afterward.
• Solving inside the constraints. When you solve a problem by adding resources, you've solved it for your configuration. When you solve it inside the constraints we already have, you've solved it for everyone. Every new code path is a cost.
• Customer discovery. You will directly integrate alongside our early customers and the many ahead to understand their pain points of using Adapt and use those to propose and build solutions.
• Strong internal and external communication. You will be responsible for writing our customer-centric blog posts and communicating directly with customers when new capabilities launch and how they can be used and understood.
• Set a high bar. Lead by example. Expect mentorship, but bring a strong default to figuring things out yourself — and be someone the rest of the team learns from. Especially at the pace of an early-stage startup in a crowded AI market.
• Collaboration. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together.

You'll also work directly with leadership: your manager ( me, Dustin), our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, and the rest of the leadership team.

How you may fail

Perhaps it's also helpful to evaluate a candidate who may not be successful at Adapt and apply inversion theory. You will not be successful if you:

• Have not operated a production system that other people depended on
• Prefer working with a formalized product function or product manager, or expect infra work to arrive as a well-specced ticket
• Draw a line between infrastructure work and product work, or would rather go deep on the system than find out whether it helped anyone
• Reach for more resources before understanding why the ones you have aren't enough, or would rather add a configuration flag than delete a code path
• View vibe coding sufficient for building a great product or think that code is a solved problem
• Don't review or understand the code that you (or your agent(s)) write and that others on the team write
• Find yourself regularly saying "it's good enough"
• Find yourself waiting for direction and clarity and don't enjoy making decisions independently

What is excellence in this role

The role of leadership is to cultivate a sense of excellence on the team and in individuals on the team that reflect it. A simple way to frame it is a three-part framework:

• What is the job to be done (see above)
• What is excellence in that job
• Holding accountable to excellence (that's both your job and mine!)

You establish excellence in this role by doing the following:

• In the first 30 days you independently ship requested and impactful changes to the stack with some guidance and direction, and you're in the on-call rotation
• In the next 30 days, you're moving more towards fuller independence, meaningfully contributing to one of sandbox, storage, or and core infra outright, and proposing ideas backed by conviction as to why they're worth investing in (and also shipping them)
• By 90 days, you're building your own ideas, directly closing the loop and establishing new loops with customers, and you're feeling like you're independent and cooking

After 90 days and beyond, any requisite training wheels are off and you're feeling empowered to own decisions, propose improvements, and you've established a strong customer-centric understanding of the platform we have and how it can be improved. We also expect your judgment to raise the bar for the engineers around you.

• Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
• Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
• Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
• Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
• A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco — direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day

Base salary: $200-300k for the SF Bay Area. Actual offer depends on skills, experience, and location. We're open to remote and to relocation for the right candidate, but prefer Bay Area applicants today. Total comp also includes equity, benefits, and potential bonus or variable pay. Your recruiter will walk you through the details.

Adapt is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Adapt encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.