Hey everyone,
We’re an early-stage, pre-launch startup building an AI agent runtime platform, and we’re looking for a founding engineer to join us.
The vision
Agent runtimes/sandboxes today are either thin wrappers on top of existing cloud orchestrators or Docker-in-a-trenchcoat hacks that weren’t designed for long-running, stateful, semi-autonomous workloads. We’re building the alternative: a purpose-built runtime where each agent gets real isolation, real networking, real storage, and real lifecycle management, without dragging along the operational complexity of Kubernetes or the cost structure of the hyperscalers. We want agents to feel like first-class citizens of the infrastructure, not guests sneaking in through a sidecar.
Who you’d be joining
The founding team right now is two people:
- Me, founder/CEO. Fullstack and DevOps background, currently handling all the engineering work.
- My co-founder/CPO. AI product management background, driving product direction and go-to-market.
Both of us have worked at unicorns serving major enterprises, with a track record of delivering highly impactful work and solid connections across the industry.
We are not Silicon Valley guys. We optimize for humans, not for looking busy, and we have zero patience for bureaucracy culture. If you want a flat, honest, execution-focused team, you will fit in here.
Location
Remote, US or Canada.
The role
You’d be working fullstack across the entire platform. Backend services, frontend, container runtime, networking, and storage, depending on what the week demands. The codebase is young enough that you won’t be squeezing features into someone else’s architecture, you’ll be helping define it.
This is not a “dev” role. It’s a founding engineer role in the real sense. We are looking for someone who will take genuine ownership of their domain, push back on bad decisions without hesitation, and help shape the product and the company as it grows. If you want tickets handed to you and a clearly scoped sprint, this isn’t the fit. If you want to build something meaningful from the ground up and have your fingerprints on every layer of it, it is.
Requirements
- Strong Go with real production experience
- Strong TypeScript, ideally SvelteKit (React/Vue/Solid folks willing to switch welcome)
- Real Incus or LXD experience, or deep container/virtualization internals background
- Comfortable across the full stack, backend to frontend to infra
- Experience working with PostgreSQL and SQL without a heavy ORM abstraction
- Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools (opencode, Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or similar). We ship with agents, not despite them
- Comfortable moving extremely fast. Early-stage pace, not Google pace
- Comfortable with a consistently changing environment. Priorities, scope, and sometimes the stack itself will shift as we learn
- Comfortable wearing every hat while we’re small
Nice to haves
- OVN or other software-defined networking experience
- ZFS in production
- ConnectRPC or gRPC experience
- Experience building multi-tenant platforms
- Experience working with TanStack Query
- Background in authz systems (Casbin, OPA, SpiceDB, etc.)
- Experience with durable job queue systems
- Familiarity with CNCF projects
- DevOps experience
- Python experience
- Open source contributions
- Experience designing and writing SDKs
- Experience deploying on Hetzner Cloud or similar non-hyperscaler infrastructure
The offer, honestly
This is a pre-seed early-stage, equity-only role right now. No salary yet. I know that filters out most people, and that’s fine. What it doesn’t filter out:
- Meaningful equity. Founding engineer range, priced for the risk of joining early. We’ll talk specifics when we know we’re a fit
- A funded round is on the horizon. Codebase, architecture, and traction story are all coming together. Once we close, this becomes a paid role with a proper package
- Technical co-ownership. You would be the technical lead for your domain, not a hired hand
- No VC baggage yet. Which means we get to make the right long-term choices now, not the ones optimized for the next board deck
If you’re interested
DM me here and I’ll share more about who we are, the architecture, the roadmap, and where we’re headed. Happy to talk shop about Incus, OVN, or why Incus is the right primitive for building agent runtimes.
Thanks for reading.
Omar