Sandbox Engineer

At Flashbots, we're building the foundations of the future Internet and financial system. As an R&D organization, we focus on MEV through our dual engines of open research and breakthrough product development – like mev-geth, Flashbots Protect, MEV-Boost, MEV-Share, Flashblocks, and BuilderNet.

Our vibe is accelerationist, exceptional, kind, and independent. We are explorers, innovators, builders, and thinkers. We thrive on action, curiosity, and impact - driving the future in an iterative way while keeping an eye towards the long term version we want to see in the world.

You’ll take end-to-end technical ownership of Flashbots’ auction sandbox. You’ll combine production operations, systems engineering, and strong documentation instincts to make the sandbox reliable, repeatable, and easy to use while working closely with searchers, TEE experts, and infrastructure partners.

• Own reliability end-to-end for the auction sandbox and related services: deployment, upgrades, incident response, and operational hygiene.

• Audit and consolidate components into a coherent system with a clear roadmap, interfaces, and single DRI ownership.

• Build and automate containerized environments for latency-sensitive workloads including reproducible builds and safe defaults.

• Create first-class operator + user docs: runbooks, examples, troubleshooting guides, and “known failure modes” playbooks that users can trust.

• Partner across teams (TEE, infra, product) to expand sandbox capability while tightening security, isolation, and developer experience.

• You have operated Linux production systems with real ownership like on-call/incident responsibility, upgrades, and long lived maintenance.

• Strong Linux + networking fundamentals: you debug below the dashboard in processes, sockets, filesystems, resource isolation.

• Hands-on containers experience (Docker/Podman, image/build workflows, debugging inside containers). Orchestration familiarity is a plus.

• A track record as a DRI for a complex service used by others including doing the “boring” reliability work.

• You write excellent docs, not as an afterthought, but as part of how systems become scalable and trustworthy.

• User empathy: you ask about constraints, workflows, and success metrics before shipping changes that break someone’s setup.

• You enjoy being the person who makes systems dependable. Specifically with runbooks, automation, alerts, and a clear mental model of failure cases.

• You prefer ownership over handoffs and can drive a roadmap while collaborating effectively with domain experts.

• You can learn quickly in unfamiliar domains (MEV/searcher workflows/TEE concepts) without needing prior crypto experience.

• Exposure to confidential computing / TEEs (e.g., Intel TDX/SGX) or adjacent isolation tech (microVMs, sandboxing, attestation).

• Experience with reproducible build pipelines or hardened execution environments like Nix, Bazel, hermetic builds and OCI hardening.

• History of maintaining open-source infra/tooling or running a serious bare metal setup.

• Significantly above market rate equity compensation package

• Unlimited PTO with a high level of freedom and autonomy for your work

• Attractive health coverage package for US employees

• $3000 Yearly budget for your individual learning and development goals

• Work alongside the brightest minds in the crypto space

• Help save the world by ensuring crypto remains decentralized, permissionless and censorship-resistant

• Remote working, while we have a preference for EU/US time zones, you can work from anywhere in the world

• Paid travel - 2 x team on-site in different parts of the world per year plus periodic travel to events
  

At Flashbots, we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, or disability status.