Founding Engineer — Infrastructure & Virtualisation

Sydney (in person) · Permanent, full-time · Salary open + 2% equity

The company

My Client is a founder-led stealth startup in Sydney that is rebuilding the personal computer. They're building an infinite compute engine: dedicated hardware that sits alongside your Mac and gives it more power than any laptop could hold. Linux, macOS and iOS virtual machines run on demand, and AI agents get machines they can fork and throw away.

The founder is on his fourth company, after a $50M raise, an acquisition and part of a journey to a $1B valuation. My Client has raised a $6M pre-seed from some of Australia's and the US's most impressive VCs, and plans a $30M round in about six months.

The role

You'll own the virtualisation layer everything else sits on. The team doesn't have all the answers yet, and finding them is the job:

• How many VMs can share one engine before memory, CPU or I/O breaks first?
• How does a machine go from zero to usable in under a second?
• What's the latency budget from keypress to pixel, and how do you hold it?
• What runs on the engine, what stays on the Mac, and how do the two feel like one computer?
• How do Linux, macOS and iOS guests share one architecture when each plays by different rules?

There are 20+ problems like these, all greenfield. You'll take a working Linux prototype to a launch-ready platform within about six months.

About you

• You think from the root level. You understand what's underneath rather than gluing things together.
• You have deep computer science foundations: OS internals, hypervisors, memory, storage and networking.
• You've worked hands-on with virtual machines at scale.
• You've built infrastructure, libraries or tools that other engineers use.
• Big pluses: open-source contributions, Apple Silicon virtualisation, Rust, C, C++, Zig or Go, and reading the research papers.
• You get obsessed with a problem and can't let it go until it's fixed.

The team

They're hiring no more than 20 people at this level, the best engineers in Australia, and each one gets 2% of the company. There's no management ladder, only owners working on the hardest problems.

The package

• Salary: open. Tell them your number.
• Equity: 2%, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff.
• Location: Sydney, in person for at least 6–9 months, then remote or hybrid.
• Visa sponsorship and full relocation support.
• Interviews: three conversations and no code tests.

Interested? Apply now for a confidential conversation.