Senior System Engineer

Title: Senior Systems Engineer

Location: NYC, 10013 (Onsite 5 days/week)

Duration: Permanent/Direct Hire

Seniority: 5+ years of experience in systems engineering or distributed systems development

Work experience

Built and owned large- scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations

Early- stage startup experience with meaningful tenure (2+ years)

Founded or scaled a startup that achieved recognition

Hard skills

Low- level systems engineering experience (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives)

Mastery of AI coding agents for development workflows

Systems programming in Go, Rust, or C/C++

Virtualization technologies (Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor)

Configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef)

Distributed storage systems at scale (e. g. , Ceph)

Key signals we're looking for:

Built and owned something significant at a prestigious, recognizable organization — not just managed existing infrastructure

Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph, MinIO) or similar large-scale data systems

Strong IC who can change the direction and trajectory of the engineering team around them

Comfortable with ambiguity and building from scratch in a startup that's scaling rapidly (~$10M ARR in

Proficient with modern AI-assisted development workflows and agent orchestration

This is NOT a DevOps/SRE role. We need someone who has built systems themselves, not just managed hyperscale infrastructure.

Tech stack: Go, Rust, C, C++, Zig, Firecracker, Ceph, Linux

What we're looking for:

We need someone with 5+ years of experience building and scaling low-level distributed systems who has delivered meaningful, zero-to-one infrastructure at a prestigious organization. You should be comfortable working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment (in-person 5 days/week in NYC) and have a track record of materially impacting the trajectory of engineering teams and infrastructure at scale. Bonus points if you've founded or been early at a startup that grew into a recognized leader, or have publications, patents, or conference talks to your name.

What you'll do:

Design, build, and scale distributed systems infrastructure that orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs monthly across a global fleet of bare-metal machines

Take ownership of critical systems challenges as compute capacity triples — including storage, networking, and scheduling at petabyte scale

Work closely with the technical co-founders and a small, elite engineering team to solve hard infrastructure problems from first principles

Develop and optimize performance-critical systems using low-level languages (Go, Rust, C/C++) with a focus on efficiency, correctness, and reliability

Lead infrastructure projects end-to-end — from design through production — that directly enable large enterprise customers and new product capabilities (agent sandboxes, background coding agents)

Leverage and orchestrate AI coding agents to accelerate development velocity and push the boundaries of what's possible with autonomous engineering workflows