Level

Baseten

Software Engineer, Storage Systems (Agent Infra)

Baseten is hiring a Software Engineer, Storage Systems (Agent Infra) for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $160k-$330k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Baseten.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • Pay on this posting starts in line with the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • This is listed as a remote role.
  • The posting mentions Cursor, Clay and AI research among its tools and skills.
  • Baseten has 105 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

cursorclay
ai-research

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

Storage decides how fast agent sandboxes start and how safely they share data. Agents need a filesystem that thousands of sandboxes mount at the same time, with strict isolation and the consistency agents need. Agent context is mostly small files, so the access patterns look very different from storage built for large files.

The Agent Infra team builds Agent Drive, the distributed filesystem that agent sandboxes mount over FUSE, and the storage underneath it. The work uses tiered caching, replication, content-addressed data, and Linux filesystem internals. In September 2026, Baseten acquired Blaxel, whose sandboxes and Agent Drive filesystem are the foundation for Baseten Sandboxes.

We are building a cloud, not just using one, so storage is designed for many tenants from day one. The team is small and ownership is big: we ship in weeks and months, not multi-year programs.

If you care about page cache coherency, FUSE, replication protocols, and content-addressable storage, we'd love to talk.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Design and implement core Agent Drive features: metadata replication, volume placement, garbage collection, and FUSE client behavior

  • Solve multi-attach correctness: cache coherency across many FUSE mounts of the same drive, dentry and inode invalidation, write ordering, and crash consistency

  • Optimize tail latency on read and write paths, including page cache strategy, writeback, prefetch, and metadata RPC batching

  • Build tenant isolation into the storage layer, including quota enforcement, blast-radius containment, and noisy-neighbor mitigation

  • Own the storage side of sandbox startup and resume performance

  • Build durable block storage for sandboxes alongside other Baseten storage teams

  • Build observability into every layer, drive storage incidents end to end, and turn each one into a permanent fix

  • Contribute upstream to the open-source storage projects we build on

REQUIREMENTS

  • Strong systems programming background in Go, Rust, and/or C/C++, with comfort reading kernel code

  • Deep understanding of Linux filesystem and storage internals: VFS, page cache, dentry and inode caches, FUSE, the block I/O stack, fsync semantics, and crash consistency

  • Hands-on experience building distributed storage systems, content-addressable storage, or large-scale caching infrastructure

  • Experience profiling I/O, memory, and RPC bottlenecks and optimizing tail latency in production

  • Ability to debug correctness bugs that only show up under concurrency or partial failure

  • You move fast and like owning a problem end to end on a small team

NICE TO HAVE

  • Experience with a distributed filesystem or object store such as JuiceFS, CephFS, or S3-compatible storage, or contributions to those projects

  • Knowledge of consensus and replication protocols (Raft, leader leases, quorum reads)

  • Experience with snapshot, clone, and copy-on-write filesystem features

  • Experience operating multi-tenant storage with hard isolation requirements

  • Familiarity with Linux performance tooling such as eBPF, io_uring, perf, ftrace, and blktrace

BENEFITS

  • Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity

  • (U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents

  • Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)

  • Paid parental leave

  • Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot

  • (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)

  • Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).

How we rate this

Software Engineer, Storage Systems (Agent Infra) at Baseten rates 87 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchCursorClay

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$160k
Typical software engineer job
$167k

This posting starts close to the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Walk me through how you've used Cursor in your day-to-day work.
  3. What are the limits of Clay that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
  4. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  5. Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Cursor, and Clay. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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