Systems Engineer

Company: Confidential - Seed-stage AI infrastructure startup
Location: San Francisco, CA (on-site 5 days per week; relocation support available)
Compensation: $180,000 - $300,000 + 0.5% - 1% equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers and new sponsorship (H-1B, TN) for candidates already in the US

About the Company

A seed-stage, venture-backed startup building the compute layer for AI agents: fast, persistent virtual machines that boot in milliseconds and run long-lived, stateful agent workloads, plus tooling that connects agents to tools and models.

The Role

Our client is hiring a Systems Engineer with depth in OS and kernel internals, virtualization, file systems or distributed infrastructure. You will work at the lowest layers of the stack (kernel, hypervisor, storage, networking) and own entire subsystems end to end on an 8-person team where your work ships to production immediately. New grads with an exceptional body of work and experienced engineers (3-6+ years) are both welcome; the CTO invests heavily in growing engineers who ramp fast.

What You Will Do

• Build core compute and runtime primitives for long-running, stateful AI agents, including virtualization, sandboxing and isolation for secure multi-tenant workloads.
• Own subsystems end to end (storage, scheduling, networking, virtualization) and ship them to production.
• Design persistent state, snapshotting and recovery mechanisms for always-on agent workloads with the CTO.
• Drive sandbox startup latency below 50ms and optimize every syscall and scheduling decision in the critical path.
• Build distributed storage layers, schedulers and networking infrastructure that scale across data centers.
• Profile, debug and benchmark systems under real-world scale, latency, correctness and reliability constraints.
• Contribute to the roadmap for on-prem GPU clusters and model training infrastructure.

What You Bring

• End-to-end ownership of a technically ambitious systems project in production, open source or research
• Proficiency in Rust, Go, C or C++ for low-level systems programming (Rust preferred)
• Depth in OS/kernel internals, file systems, networking or low-level memory management
• A verifiable body of work: open-source contributions (e.g. kernel patches), systems papers, technical blogs or substantial GitHub activity
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent rigorous program
• Evidence of exceptional drive (competitive programming, hackathon wins, competitive sports, technical writing or talks)
• Ability to work on-site in San Francisco 5 days a week

Nice to Have

• Virtualization, hypervisors, KVM, Firecracker or container runtimes
• Distributed storage, replication, consensus or consistency models
• GPU infrastructure or AI/ML systems (training clusters, on-prem GPU setup)

Benefits

0.5% - 1% equity; relocation support (flights plus 6 months of rent covered).

Interview Process

Behavioral and culture-fit screen (30 min), technical interview with the CTO (1 hour; may be merged with the screen for strong candidates), optional paid work trial (about 3 days), offer within days of a positive signal.

Tech Stack

Rust, Go, C, C++, Linux, KVM, Firecracker, hypervisors, Kubernetes, Docker, distributed systems, file systems, kernel development, CUDA, GPU infrastructure, AWS EC2, networking, storage