Staff Systems Engineer

Company: Confidential - Series B developer-infrastructure company
Location: New York, NY (on-site; relocation assistance for exceptional candidates)
Compensation: $280,000 - $380,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must hold a transferable US work visa)

About the Company

A fast-growing Series B infrastructure company that runs CI workloads much faster on its own global fleet of bare-metal machines, orchestrating tens of millions of virtual machines a month for thousands of companies.

The Role

Our client is hiring a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure. You will work at the kernel level with bare-metal machines, virtualization and distributed storage, own the architecture of critical platforms, and change the technical direction of the team as a senior IC while the company triples its compute capacity.

What You Will Do

• Own the architecture of infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet.
• Own production outcomes (reliability, performance, operational excellence) as compute capacity triples.
• Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps with the technical co-founders.
• Build at the kernel and filesystem level with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale.
• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.

What You Bring

• 8+ years in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering
• Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations
• Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed a team's technical direction
• Low-level systems work (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives): building the substrate, not building on managed cloud
• Startup or high-growth scale-up experience with small teams
• Solid tenure with clearly delivered impact
• Mastery of AI coding agents in your workflow

Nice to Have

• Systems programming in Go, Rust or C/C++
• Virtualization (Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor)
• Distributed storage at scale (e.g. Ceph)
• Publications, patents or conference talks

Interview Process

Recruiter screen (30 min), two systems technical interviews (1 hour each), on-site day, final chat with the CEO (30 min).

Tech Stack

Go, Rust, C, Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, Linux, eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, bare-metal infrastructure, GitHub Actions