At a Glance
- Tasks: Build and evolve a secure, high-performance agent sandboxing platform for AI workflows.
- Company: Join Scale, a leader in developing reliable AI systems for impactful decisions.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, health benefits, remote work options, and growth opportunities.
- Other info: Inclusive workplace committed to equal opportunity and personal growth.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on AI technology while enhancing developer experience.
- Qualifications: 4+ years in high-performance systems software and strong Linux internals knowledge.
The predicted salary is between 59400 - 72600 £ per year.
As a Software Engineer on the AI Infrastructure team, you'll help build and evolve our agent sandboxing platform — the secure, high-performance code execution layer powering our agentic workflows, deployed across both internal and customer-managed environments. This is a role for someone who cares as much about the experience of the engineers and researchers using this system as they do about the kernel internals underneath it. You’ll combine deep systems expertise (isolation, virtualisation, performance) with an obsession for developer experience: clean APIs, clear error messages, good docs, and a client library that feels well-crafted. You’ll partner closely with internal teams to understand how they use the platform, debug their issues, and shape a roadmap that balances immediate needs with long-term architecture.
You will:
- Design and build the sandboxing platform, client library, and API surface for secure code execution across containerized and virtualized environments
- Ensure strong isolation, security, and reproducibility of execution across user sessions and workloads
- Optimise for cold-start latency, memory footprint, and resource utilisation at scale
- Drive down error rates through systematic debugging, monitoring, and proactive fixes
- Partner closely with internal teams using the platform to understand their needs, debug issues, and build tooling that serves their use cases
- Respond to incidents and production issues with urgency, conducting root cause analysis and implementing preventive fixes
- Help develop and maintain a product roadmap for sandboxing, balancing immediate needs against long-term architectural investment
- Lead architecture reviews and own projects end-to-end, from design through deployment, in fast-paced cross-functional settings
Ideally you'd have:
- 4+ years of experience building high-performance systems software, with meaningful time spent maintaining libraries, SDKs, or developer-facing APIs
- Deep understanding of Linux internals: process isolation, memory management, cgroups, namespaces, etc.
- Experience with containerisation and virtualisation technologies (e.g., Docker, Firecracker, gVisor, QEMU, Kata Containers)
- Proficiency in a systems programming language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++
- A track record of obsessing over developer experience — API design, error propagation, documentation, and the small details that make a library feel well-crafted
- Comfort working across infrastructure layers, from kernel modules to orchestration frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes)
- Strong debugging skills and the ability to navigate performance/security tradeoffs in production systems
- Comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to context-switch between reactive incident work and proactive product development
Nice to haves:
- Experience as a founder or early engineer at an infrastructure-focused startup, owning a product end-to-end
- Familiarity with LLM agents and agent frameworks (e.g., OpenHands, Agent2Agent, MCP)
- Experience running secure workloads in multi-tenant or untrusted environments (e.g., FaaS, CI sandboxes, remote notebooks)
- Exposure to snapshotting and restore techniques (e.g., CRIU, VM snapshots, overlays)
- Open-source contributions to systems or developer-tools projects
- History of on-call/incident response for production systems
AI Infrastructure Engineer, Sandbox Platform Scale AI London, UK employer: Neura Market
Cognition is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment where innovation thrives and employees are empowered to tackle some of the world's most significant challenges in AI. With a small, talent-dense team comprised of industry leaders from top tech companies, employees benefit from unparalleled mentorship and growth opportunities while contributing to groundbreaking projects like Devin and Windsurf. Located in Europe, our collaborative culture fosters creativity and ambition, making it an ideal place for those looking to make a meaningful impact in the field of applied AI.
