Senior Systems Engineer, Virtualization

Foundry is actively seeking talented candidates at the Senior to Principal level, with leveling determined based on experience and demonstrated expertise. We welcome individuals who bring deep technical knowledge, strategic thinking, and a track record of impact, and we tailor roles to align with each candidate’s unique strengths and career trajectory.

 

About Foundry

At Foundry, you’ll play a pivotal role in building the software that powers the future of AI. Your work is critical—not only in scaling our systems but also in ensuring their reliability and performance at every level. As AI workloads grow in size and complexity, developing scalable, efficient systems is the cornerstone of our mission.

Our platform is designed to support cutting-edge AI workloads, operating in high-performance, multi-tenant environments. In this role, you’ll focus on designing, implementing, and optimizing virtualization solutions for GPU, storage, and network resources. You’ll tackle challenging, ambiguous problems to ensure our virtualization infrastructure upholds the highest standards of performance, security, and reliability.

At Foundry, we value precision, clear communication, and relentless innovation in everything we do—whether it’s product engineering, system architecture, or scalability. You’ll collaborate closely with internal product and platform teams, applying your deep knowledge of virtualization technologies like virtual machines (VMs), containers, or hypervisors. Your contributions will directly shape the future of our platform and drive our success in advancing AI.

If you’re passionate about pushing technical boundaries and shaping the future of AI for practitioners and newcomers alike, join us to be part of something transformative.

 

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain virtualization solutions for GPU, storage, and network resources to meet business needs and performance goals.
• Investigate ambiguous problems, identify root causes, and create innovative solutions.
• Stay at the forefront of emerging virtualization, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) technologies through research and development (R&D), identifying opportunities to drive innovation and improve our platform.
• Build resilient systems with a focus on performance optimization, scalability, and security best practices. Ensure systems are efficient, secure, and reliable.
• Cross functionally partner with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to understand stakeholder requirements and deliver effective solutions.
• Produce well-documented designs, code, and technical materials to support team collaboration and long-term system maintainability.

 

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or equivalent.
• At least six years of hands-on experience in a systems or software engineering role
• Familiarity with:
• Operating systems, networking, infrastructure, software engineering, etc.
• Virtualization [one of]: QEMU, KVM, Cloud Hypervisor, containers, Kata
• GPUs, high-performance networking (InfiniBand or RoCE)
• Proficiency in at least one mainstream programming language in a professional capacity, along with solid software engineering best practices.
• Enthusiasm to tackle complex technical challenges with minimal guidance and develop innovative solutions.
• Experienced in large-scale systems architecture and design, with proven ability to own and develop critical components of products and platforms.
• Thrives on taking initiative and driving the development of impactful, high-quality systems.

 

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with performance tuning and optimizing virtualized environments, HPC virtualization (SR-IOV), or virtualization in a cloud environment preferred.
• Expertise in a scripting language, Python preferred.
• Experience with Linux kernels.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, or similar frameworks.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (cue, terraform) and ansible.
• Enthusiastic about using AI-powered tools to boost productivity.

 

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• 401k Plan with 4% company match
• 21 days of PTO & 14 company holidays; including 2 floating holidays

 

Salary Range Information 

In consideration of market analysis and various pertinent factors, the remuneration bracket for this role is set between $170,000 and $230,000. Nevertheless, adjustments beyond this range could be warranted for candidates whose qualifications substantially deviate from those delineated in the job description.

 

In-Office requirement

At Foundry, we take our work extremely seriously, though not always ourselves. We recognize that we are striving to achieve something substantial—an all-too-rare and elusive counterfactual contribution. Our work is not easy, so we seek out any lever that can accelerate our progress and increase the likelihood of realizing our full ambitions. Working collaboratively in person is one such lever.

Our headquarters is in Palo Alto (next to Caltrain on University Ave.), and we recently opened a new office in San Francisco (Financial District/SoMa) for our teammates based there. We expect team members to primarily work from their local office (Palo Alto or San Francisco), with everyone gathering at HQ one day a week while our team remains small and cross-team collaboration is critical.

This approach is built on trust. We take our mission seriously and are committed to fostering an environment where you can make impactful decisions and drive success. We also understand that life can present challenges, and if extenuating circumstances arise, we’re here to support you.

Ultimately, we believe this guidance helps us be as effective as possible while maintaining the spirit of teamwork and flexibility.

 

Equal Opportunity Employer

Foundry maintains a strict commitment to Equal Opportunity employment practices. All applicants are evaluated without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.

We emphasize that candidates need not fulfill every expectation listed to be eligible for this position. Our objective is to cultivate a diverse team encompassing a spectrum of backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets.