Infra Engineer

Description: Build the infra that empower our users to build without worrying about infra

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Compensation: $175k, 1% equity

About Val Town

Val Town is the most delightful way to get JavaScript running in the cloud. Customers use us to create everything from small automations to full-stack web apps.

Our mission is to spread the joy of programming. We believe everyone should code for the same reasons that everyone should read and write: access to the magical world it opens for you. Reliable, fast infrastructure is what makes that possible.

Under the hood, we operate a custom sandboxing platform that executes untrusted user code at scale — one of the hardest and most interesting infra problems out there.

We're a small team in Brooklyn — including Steve Krouse, Tom MacWright, Brent Jackson, Charlie Molthrop, and Pete Millspaugh — building a product that programmers love. Come join us!

Who we’re looking for

You love understanding how systems work under the hood, and you share our passion for making programming delightful and accessible.

You thrive at a startup. You crave responsibility, ownership, and the trust to do what needs to be done.

You're ambitious, humble, reflective, and striving to grow. You have extremely high integrity.

You're a true systems thinker who understands how all the pieces fit together — networking, compute, storage, orchestration.

You bias toward simplicity and shipping incrementally, not architecting perfect systems.

You'd rather delete code than add it, and you'd rather use a boring, proven tool than a shiny new one.

You're a clear, thoughtful communicator.

What you’ll be doing

At Val Town, infra engineers build, operate, and evolve our running systems, most notably our own custom Functions As A Service platform. We run our own sandboxed runtime for user code, so you'll work on isolation, resource limits, cold start times, and everything that makes a FaaS platform feel fast and safe. Your job is to keep our platform running and improving so our customers can get their delightful serverless experience.

Your day-to-day will include making our runtime faster, cheaper, more scalable, and reliable. You'll help us respond to incidents, do post-mortems, and increase system observability. We need someone who can incrementally help us improve our systems as we scale – as well as help us design the next generations of our platform that actually ship. See our blog for how we think about building.

Your skills & experience

Must-have

Experience running and debugging production systems

Linux & networking fundamentals — proxies, routing, TLS, DNS

Experience with container or VM-level isolation (Firecracker, gVisor, V8 isolates, Docker)

Experience with site-reliability and observability (PagerDuty, Honeycomb, etc.)

You've been on-call and have opinions about how to keep systems simple enough that on-call isn't miserable

Bonus

Experience building or operating a developer platform, FaaS, PaaS, or cloud computing platform

Experience with Deno or another JS runtime

Experience working on cost optimization and compute efficiency

Interest in writing about what you build (blog posts, tutorials) or engaging our developer community

How we work

We’re a small, Brooklyn-based team that ships quickly with high-trust.

Rhythm: Light daily stand-up, then deep solo focus. We pair or whiteboard whenever it’s useful, and we all grab lunch together most days.

Culture: Flat and collaborative — decisions are made by the person closest to the problem or most excited to solve it, not by hierarchy.

Process: We plan lightly, message on Discord, write thoughtful GitHub issues, and document what we build so teammates can move fast.

Values: High-integrity, friendly, and curious. We care about each other and about creating tools that make programming joyful — not about chasing hype.

Fun: We love shipping improvements big and small every day to delight our users.

On-call: We share on-call responsibility and invest in keeping systems simple enough that pages are rare and actionable.

If you love high-autonomy, high-impact engineering with people who genuinely enjoy working together, you’ll feel at home here.

Benefits

Transparent compensation & generous equity

Private health, dental, and vision insurance

401k contributions

1% of revenue to removing carbon from the atmosphere

Participation in the OSS Pledge

Flexible PTO

Interview process

Chat with Steve and Tom (2x 30 min)

Half-day onsite to chat with our team (5× 45 min) — a mix of technical and cultural conversations