Senior Systems Engineer

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

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 <2 years)

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.