Team Lead, Windows Sandboxes
$250,000–$300,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the architecture and delivery of the Windows sandbox runtime, building guest environments on a KVM-based stack and optimizing boot, provisioning, and login times for instant-start experiences. Design infrastructure supporting snapshotting, pausing, restoring, and forking Windows VMs, while managing virtio and driver integration across guest environments. Develop reliable display and input streaming for AI agents, automate Windows services and registry configuration via PowerShell and WinRM, and establish a licensing-compliant multi-tenant architecture. Lead a pod of senior engineers, hiring and mentoring while shipping production code directly. Partner with Product on roadmap priorities and enterprise commitments, reporting to the CTO in San Francisco with a salary of $250,000-$300,000 plus equity.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional systems, infrastructure, virtualization, or platform engineering experience
- 2+ years of experience leading engineers responsible for production systems
- Deep experience operating Windows infrastructure at scale outside of primarily Microsoft-native environments
- Hands-on experience running Windows guests using KVM/QEMU
- Strong experience with virtio drivers and Windows VM image automation
- Deep understanding of Windows internals, including the boot process, services, registry, and system configuration
- Experience automating Windows infrastructure using PowerShell, WinRM, unattended provisioning, or similar technologies
- Strong systems programming ability with Go, Rust, C, or C++, or significant C#/PowerShell expertise combined with a systems programming language
- Experience designing reliable, multi-tenant infrastructure with strong isolation requirements
- Comfortable acting as a player-coach—leading a team while spending most of your time building alongside them
- Pragmatic understanding of how technical, operational, and licensing constraints affect infrastructure architecture
- High ownership mindset with the ability to take infrastructure from architecture through production operations
- Must be available for Location options in San Francisco or Croatia
Desired Qualifications
- Experience building VDI, Cloud PC, virtual desktop, or desktop-as-a-service infrastructure
- Background working on systems comparable to Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, or large-scale remote workstation platforms
- Experience with game streaming or other low-latency remote desktop technologies
- Experience running GPU-accelerated Windows virtual machines
- Deep familiarity with remote display protocols such as RDP or SPICE
- Experience building custom video, display, or input streaming infrastructure
- Familiarity with Windows SPLA, BYOL, or other licensing models relevant to multi-tenant cloud infrastructure
- Experience optimizing VM density, cold-start performance, and infrastructure unit economics
- Experience supporting AI computer-use agents or desktop automation systems
- Background at a virtualization, cloud infrastructure, serverless compute, VDI, or hyperscaler infrastructure organization
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