Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure)

About Steel

Steel is building open-source browser infrastructure for AI agents and apps. We make it easy for developers to ship AI products that interact with the web using our Sessions API.

With over 6,000 GitHub stars, dozens of paying customers, and millions of sessions served monthly, we grew our platform 50x in 2025 purely through word-of-mouth and our open-source community. Backed by world-class investors, we're building a small, highly motivated, talent-dense team that's shaping the future of how humans interact with the internet.

More on the problems we're solving: https://docs.steel.dev/overview/intro-to-steel

Overview

Engineers at Steel build distributed systems that power millions of browser sessions for AI agents. We're dealing with VM-level performance optimization, global orchestration, multi-tenant isolation, and developer infrastructure. The work spans kernel debugging to API design.

The ideal Steel engineer has deep systems knowledge but ships across the stack. Core requirements: you understand how computers actually work, you ship, and you'd rather ask for forgiveness than wait for permission.

We're looking for engineers with 5+ years of serious distributed systems experience. If you've operated production infrastructure at scale and want to build the browser automation layer for AI, let's talk.

The Problem

AI agents need browsers. Browsers are slow, memory-hungry, and difficult to run at scale. We've built infrastructure that achieves sub-second browser session startup times and serves millions of sessions monthly. You'll be working on extending this core platform to handle 10x our current volume.

The Tech

Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Nomad, Firecracker VMs, Pulumi, Go, Docker
Backend: Rust, Node.js, Fastify, NATS, PostgreSQL, Redis
Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vite
Debugging: Grafana, Loki, Axiom, distributed tracing, eBPF, kernel tracing

Mostly TypeScript for cohesion. Rust/Go for hot paths. Linux internals everywhere.

The Projects

We're looking for experienced infrastructure engineers to work on:

• Globally distributed VM orchestration with sub-second startup and intelligent scheduling

• Multi-tenant isolation architecture for running untrusted code at scale

• Kernel-level observability: eBPF tracing, distributed profiling, time-travel debugging

• High-performance networking: anycast routing, cross-region failover, kernel bypass

• Multi-cloud deployment infrastructure with Pulumi (AWS/GCP/Azure + customer VPCs)

• Developer primitives for reliable browser automation

• Open-source tooling

What We're Looking For

Must have:

• 5+ years operating distributed systems handling thousands of requests per second

• Deep Linux knowledge: things like kernel debugging, eBPF, syscall optimization

• Battle-tested understanding of resource isolation, multi-tenancy, security boundaries

• Network engineering fundamentals: you've debugged production packet loss

Strong signals:

• Production experience with VM hypervisors (Firecracker/QEMU/KVM)

• You've contributed to Linux kernel, hypervisors, or core infrastructure projects

• You've built custom orchestration (not just used K8s)

• You have opinions on io_uring vs epoll, cgroup v2, NUMA scheduling

• Ex-founder or early engineer at infrastructure companies

• You've shipped developer-facing infrastructure products

The Culture

We're a small team (currently 4) building foundational infrastructure that AI companies depend on. Everyone writes code, debugs production, and owns outcomes. We grew 50x in 2025 through word-of-mouth because the product works.

We move fast. There will be intense periods during launches and incidents, but that's infrastructure. We expect autonomy, technical depth, and high output.

What We Offer

• Founding engineer equity (employee #5-7)

• Competitive salary

• Health/dental/vision for you + family

• Regular team events and off-sites

• Brand-new laptop setup + gym membership subsidies

• Meaningful architecture decisions (you'll design systems, not just implement specs)

• Direct customer impact: work with innovative AI companies transforming healthcare, supply chain, accounting, and more