Technical Context & Problem Space
Hack on Firecracker and rust-vmm: the minimalist Rust KVM virtual machine monitor powering AWS Lambda, Fargate, and AI agent sandboxes.
Firecracker boots isolated Linux microVMs in <125ms with <5MB memory overhead using minimal Rust virtio-net/virtio-block emulation, userfaultfd snapshot restoration, and seccomp-bpf jailers. Every microsecond saved on the hot path translates directly into lower hardware footprint.
Key Engineering Deliverables
- Optimize virtio ring buffer throughput over `io_uring`, harden guest-to-host memory isolation, and reduce microVM snapshot restore tail latency.
- Harden distributed state machines and I/O pipelines written in Firecracker, io_uring, no_std, eBPF against network partitions and disk faults.
- Build deterministic benchmarks and chaos tests that catch regressions before production rollout.
Candidate Profile & Compensation
- 3+ years writing performance-critical systems software in Rust (with production exposure to Firecracker and io_uring).
- Solid grasp of virtual memory, page caches, thread-per-core scheduling, or modern hardware interconnects.
- Annual base band: $195k - $275k USD (US / EU Remote), paired with equity and async-first remote workflows.
