Software Engineer, Compute

Location: Hybrid - San Francisco

Department: Engineering

About the role

Developers are building faster than ever. Humans and agents are deploying more than 6 million times a day on Vercel, spinning up over 2 million Sandboxes and serving a trillion requests per month. Every single one is powered by our own compute infrastructure.

The Persistence team sits within Vercels Compute division. This team owns the deep infrastructure within Hive (our compute platform) focussing on storage and state for all our workloads (Builds, Sandboxes and Functions). This work is redefining compute with features like Fluid Compute, Persistent Sandboxes, and Custom Images.

As a Software Engineer on the Persistence team, youll work on the infrastructure that runs 100s of instances across every region where our customers deploy code, rethinking low-level primitives and contributing to platform features that improve the experience for thousands of developers every day.

This role is based in London, UK. If youre within commuting distance of our London office, the role includes in-office anchor days. If youre located further afield within the UK, the role is fully remote. For location-specific details, please connect with our recruiting team.

What youll do

• Manage and improve our fleet of clusters, running 100s of instances deployed in every region where our customers deploy and run their code.
• Write Golang on a daily basis and use Terraform to provision infrastructure; youll get to know Nomad as our scheduler for managing workloads.
• Rethink the primitives of our infrastructure — working with virtual filesystems, Linux primitives, and low-level virtualisation.
• Own the reliability and performance of our compute platform, including on-call coverage for a team where every improvement has outsized impact at scale.
• Collaborate across teams to drive the convergence of all compute at Vercel.

What you need

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with Golang strongly preferred.
• Deep experience with virtual machines, file systems and Linux — you like knowing how things work under the hood (tcpdump, strace, and iptables are familiar tools).
• Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale; you design for performance and reliability.
• Experience with schedulers and orchestrators for managing containers and non-containerised workloads (e.g. Nomad, Kubernetes).
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills, with a genuine enthusiasm for digging into problems that dont have obvious solutions.

Bonus if you

• Have worked on low-level virtualisation or sandbox execution environments.
• Have product engineering experience and care about the developer-facing impact of infrastructure decisions.
• Have experience with on-call operations for large-scale distributed systems.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
• Flexible Time Off.
• We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.

 

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