---
title: 'Software Engineer - Networking (Agent Infra) at Baseten'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-networking-agent-infra-baseten-san-francisco-sv41mcqejb10'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-01'
---

# Software Engineer - Networking (Agent Infra) at Baseten

- **Company:** [Baseten](https://feeny.ai/companies/baseten)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$330k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-01
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten/d7e9ee32-dee8-459f-9d8a-538d65df51ae

## Job description

## ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our [$1.5B Series F](https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-series-f/), led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.

## THE ROLE

Every agent on Baseten Sandboxes runs in its own microVM. Agents call models, reach tools and APIs, expose services, and more and more often talk to each other. Networking built into today's cloud providers was not designed for very large numbers of isolated machines that suspend, resume, and exchange data constantly. The Agent Infra team builds its own networking stack for sandboxes, designed from the start for that scale. It runs in user space, with VPP ([FD.io](http://FD.io)) as its main data plane technology, and is built from virtualized network functions (VNF/NFV): carrier-grade, low-latency packet processing designed for very large numbers of agents. In September 2026, Baseten [acquired Blaxel](https://www.baseten.co/blog/blaxel-is-joining-baseten-to-build-the-future-of-agentic-cloud/), whose sandboxes, storage, and networking are the foundation for [Baseten Sandboxes](https://docs.baseten.co/sandboxes). You'll build multi-tenant virtual private networking that connects each customer's agents and services privately and securely, using modern overlay technologies. We are building a cloud, not just using one. We want engineers who expose the network as a programmable API and write the code, not operators who push router and switch configuration. The team is small and ownership is big: we ship in weeks and months, not multi-year programs. This role is separate from Baseten's GPU-to-GPU networking. Here you'll own how sandboxes connect to each other, to Baseten services, to customer networks, and to the internet. If you've built user-space data planes, virtualized network functions, or multi-tenant cloud networking and want to design one for agents, we'd love to talk.

## EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

- [Blaxel is joining Baseten to build the future of agentic infrastructure](https://www.baseten.co/blog/blaxel-is-joining-baseten-to-build-the-future-of-agentic-cloud/)
- [Securing the open frontier with NVIDIA OpenShell and Blaxel sandboxes](https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-carbon/)
- [Baseten Sandboxes documentation](https://docs.baseten.co/sandboxes)

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Design and build the user-space, VPP-based data plane that connects microVM sandboxes to each other, to Baseten services, and to the internet
- Build multi-tenant virtual private networking and overlays (for example EVPN, GENEVE, VXLAN) across regions
- Expose the network as a programmable API that the rest of the platform calls
- Cut latency and raise connection scale for agent-to-agent and agent-to-service traffic
- Build routing that sends each request to the nearest region and keeps connections working as sandboxes suspend and resume
- Build secure ingress and egress for sandboxes, including firewalling, static egress IPs, and custom domains with managed TLS
- Build L7 proxies for request inspection, filtering, secret injection, and auditing
- Own per-sandbox addressing, including IPv6, and network isolation between tenants
- Build observability for the packet path across guest, host, and network, and debug production issues end to end
- Work closely with the compute, storage, GPU infrastructure, and datacenter teams

## REQUIREMENTS

- Experience with user-space packet processing (DPDK, VPP, or similar) or virtualized network functions (VNF/NFV)
- Experience building multi-tenant networking in production (VXLAN, GENEVE, VRF)
- Experience building a software-defined network, overlay network, or packet-processing data plane in production
- You write production code: strong systems programming in Rust, Go, and/or C/C++. Network architects are welcome if they build, not only configure
- Experience building cloud networking as the provider, not only consuming a cloud provider's network
- Solid grounding in TCP/IP and routing
- Experience building or operating proxies, load balancers, or L4/L7 gateways at scale
- Experience debugging latency and throughput problems with packet captures, tracing, and profiling
- You move fast and like owning a problem end to end on a small team

## NICE TO HAVE

- Experience with VPP / [FD.io](http://FD.io), our main networking technology
- Experience with GENEVE or VXLAN overlays and EVPN
- Linux kernel networking: eBPF/XDP, netfilter or nftables, network namespaces
- Familiarity with virtual machine networking: virtio-net, vhost, TAP devices, or networking for Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor
- Experience running IPv6 at scale
- Background in telecom user-plane or 5G core networking, or in low-latency trading networks
- Experience with multi-region traffic routing, anycast, or BGP
- Experience with TLS termination, DNS, and egress security controls

## BENEFITS

- Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
- (U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
- Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
- Paid parental leave
- Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
- (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)
- Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you. At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).

## About Baseten

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Baseten is an AI infrastructure platform that provides high-performance inference infrastructure for deploying, optimizing, and managing AI models in production.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series F)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), Phil Howes (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing / MLOps
- **Target customers**: B2B, targeting AI-native companies, enterprises, and developers building and deploying large-scale AI applications. Notable customers include Abridge, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: Provide the tooling, expertise, and hardware needed for teams to bring performant AI products to market as quickly and reliably as possible. The company's core belief is that "inference is everything" and that the future of AI will consist of millions of specialized models embedded into every product and workflow.

## Products & Services
- **Baseten Cloud**: A fully-managed, global deployment platform for AI models. Provides out-of-the-box performance optimizations, 99.99% uptime, and massive horizontal scale. Supports single-tenant and self-hosted (hybrid) deployments.
- **Baseten Inference Stack**: The proprietary, underlying technology that powers the platform. Includes custom model runtimes (LLMs, embeddings, voice AI, image generation), advanced caching, custom kernels, and cutting-edge performance research. Claims 2x higher throughput and 10% lower latency for embeddings (BEI).
- **Baseten Chains**: Enables granular hardware and autoscaling for compound AI systems, reportedly powering 6x better GPU usage and cutting latency in half.
- **Frontier Gateway (Pre-optimized Model APIs)**: Allows users to instantly test and deploy pre-optimized versions of the latest open-source, custom, and fine-tuned models (e.g., Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM, gpt-oss).
- **Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)**: A service offering where Baseten engineers work side-by-side with key customers to build, optimize, and scale their models from prototype to production.
- **Training on Baseten**: Allows users to train models and deploy them in one click on the inference-optimized infrastructure.
- **Monetization API**: An inference API that allows model developers to monetize their models.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not privately disclosed, but the company has raised a total of **$585M** in funding.
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of **$7.0M** (as per LinkedIn). Total funding of **$585M**.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: IVP, Spark Capital, Bond, CapitalG, South Park Commons, Greylock.
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Announced a **Series F** funding round (details not fully public in search results).
    - **Massive headcount growth**: 224.4% year-over-year, now employing 201 people.
    - **LinkedIn follower growth**: 199.9% year-over-year.
    - **Active job postings**: 112 open roles.
    - Acquired the company **Parsed**.
    - Backed by high-profile institutional investors including CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) and IVP.

## Competitive Advantages
- **High-Performance Inference Stack**: A proprietary, deeply optimized stack focusing on ultra-low latency and high throughput for the most demanding Gen AI workloads (voice AI, real-time streaming, complex compound AI systems).
- **Customer Obsession & Forward Deployed Engineering**: A hands-on, consulting-style approach with their FDE team, which builds deep, sticky relationships with high-value customers like Abridge and Notion.
- **Global & Hybrid Cloud Flexibility**: Offers both fully-managed cloud and self-hosted deployments within customer VPCs, providing scalability and security for enterprises with strict data governance requirements.
- **Founding Team's Deep Technical Credibility**: Built by former researchers and engineers who experienced the "deployment hell" of AI systems firsthand, giving them deep empathy and expertise in the problem they are solving.

## Strategic Focus
- **Dominating the "Inference-as-a-Service" Market**: The company's core thesis is that inference will become the largest market ever created, and they are building the infrastructure to power it.
- **Scaling for High-Volume, Mission-Critical Workloads**: Focus on reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency for customers who cannot afford downtime or latency (e.g., AI phone calls, real-time translation).
- **Deepening the Technical Stack**: Continuously investing in performance research (custom kernels, new decoding techniques) and expanding capabilities into new areas like voice AI and audio streaming.
- **Aggressive Hiring**: With 112 open positions and massive YoY growth, scaling the engineering, sales, and operations teams is a clear priority.

## Why Work Here
- **Hard Technical Problems**: Engineers work on the most challenging problems in modern infrastructure—model serving, low-level GPU optimization, networking, distributed systems, and observability. This is a high-agency, high-impact engineering environment.
- **High Growth Trajectory**: The company is experiencing explosive growth (224% headcount increase, active hiring). This offers significant career acceleration and ownership opportunities.
- **Strong Engineering Culture**: Founded by engineers, for engineers. The culture emphasizes "first-principles thinking across the entire stack" and a "customer-obsessed" mindset. The employer rating on compensation, culture, and work-life balance is rated highly (5.0).
- **Top-Tier Team & Investors**: The team has strong talent density with hires from Meta, Stripe, Google, NVIDIA, and Databricks. Being backed by top-tier VCs provides stability and a clear long-term vision.
- **Hybrid/In-Office**: Based in San Francisco with a strong in-person or hybrid culture common for fast-moving infrastructure startups.

## Sources
1. [Company Website](https://www.baseten.co/)
2. [Careers Page](https://www.baseten.co/resources/careers/)
3. [About Us (Team)](https://www.baseten.co/about-us/)
4. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/baseten)
5. [Ashby Careers Portal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/baseten)

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