Systems Engineer

About AFK AI AFK AI (“Away From Keyboard”) is building the execution layer for everyday work with agentic AI. We build proactive agent systems that connect scattered tools, context, files, messages, apps, and devices so one human intent can become finished work. We believe the next leap in AI is not another chatbox. It is an always-on agent that can perceive context, remember preferences, operate real tools, coordinate specialist agents, and safely deliver outcomes across computers and workflows. Our mission is to make the optimal decision visible and reserve human attention for judgment, taste, strategy, relationships, and responsibility. We are a small, ambitious team with backgrounds from Deno, Vercel, ByteDance, OpenAI, and high-scale infrastructure/product companies. We build quickly, but we care about systems design, product taste, tests, privacy, and the long-term reliability of machines that act on behalf of users. Mission Build the distributed runtime and infrastructure that lets large numbers of persistent AI agents run safely, cheaply, and reliably. You will work on backend services, storage and observability infrastructure, cloud sandboxes, and security. This role is for engineers who like hard systems problems: concurrency, scheduling, sandboxing, reliability, and operational correctness. What you’ll work on Scale storage and real-time streaming architecture for agent scheduling and coordination across clusters. Build and operate secure, efficient, and trusted cloud sandbox infrastructure. Build and operate observability stacks. Collaborate with agent engineers to expose runtime primitives that are simple for agents to use and safe for users to trust. You might be a fit if you have Strong backend/systems engineering experience in production environments. Deep fluency in Go, Rust, C/C++, or another systems/backend language. Strong understanding of concurrency, transactions, distributed coordination, database internals, networking, and observability. Interest in AI agents as a systems problem, not just a model/prompt problem. Bonus points Experience with distributed databases, observability stacks, and streaming systems. Experience with VM/container technologies and confidential computing. Experience operating high-scale realtime systems, developer platforms, inference gateways, or SaaS infrastructure. Show more Show less