Founding Systems Engineer

AI has changed how much one person can create. The computers we use haven’t caught up.

We’re hitting those limits ourselves—and building Hand to move beyond them. Our ambition is to make access to more computing power radically easier, so people can build more of what they imagine.

We’re backed by Blackbird and TEN13, having raised our pre-seed round in three days. We’re assembling a small founding team in Sydney to help shape what comes next.

The opportunity

You’ll build foundational systems at the intersection of virtualization, networking, operating systems, and interactive computing.

The challenge is to make additional computing capacity fast, dependable, and easy to use. That means solving difficult problems beneath an experience that should feel effortless.

You’ll work directly with the founding team, own substantial architectural decisions, and take systems from early experiments into production. We’ll share the product and architecture in more detail when we speak.

What you’ll work on

• Virtualization and infrastructure. Build and operate the systems that provision, run, and manage computing environments.
• Performance. Reduce startup latency, investigate resource contention, and improve responsiveness across the stack.
• Networking and streaming. Make remote interaction reliable under real network conditions.
• State and recovery. Build systems that preserve useful work, handle interruption, and recover predictably from failure.
• Concurrency. Reason carefully about scheduling, ordering, backpressure, cancellation, and shared state.
• Production reliability. Create the instrumentation needed to understand behaviour, diagnose failures, and validate improvements.

You’ll help decide where we need deeper engineering and where a simpler approach will get us further.

How deep does the work go?

We’re looking for someone who wants to understand what happens beneath the API.

When a system behaves unexpectedly, you can follow the problem through application code, runtimes, processes, networks, and the operating system. You read source, inspect traces, build small reproductions, and measure what changes.

You don’t need to know every layer already. You do need depth somewhere, strong fundamentals, and the curiosity to keep digging.

What you bring

• Evidence of building substantial software and solving difficult systems problems.
• Depth in Linux, virtualization, networking, storage, distributed systems, or runtime internals.
• A precise understanding of concurrency, asynchronous execution, and failure modes.
• The ability to reason about latency, throughput, memory, and resource use.
• Careful debugging instincts and a willingness to test your assumptions.
• The judgment to balance shipping speed with the foundations a reliable product needs.
• Clear communication and enthusiasm for building closely with a small team.

Experience with Firecracker, KVM, microVMs, or remote desktop technologies would be valuable. Your engineering judgment matters more than matching a particular stack.

Why join

The foundational decisions are still ahead of us. You’ll have substantial influence over the architecture, engineering practices, and product itself.

You’ll work on technically demanding infrastructure with a direct connection to what people can create. Success means people can attempt more without having to think about the computing machinery that makes it possible.

We offer competitive salaries and strong equity, with a substantial employee ownership pool reserved for the people building Hand.

We’re building our core team together in Sydney.