Staff Systems Engineer
On-siteNew York City, New York, United States or New York, United States
Job Summary
Own and drive architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms running large-scale virtualized workloads across distributed bare-metal environments. Take responsibility for production outcomes including reliability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence. Design and build low-level systems involving Linux, virtualization, distributed storage, resource isolation, and infrastructure orchestration. Work at the kernel and filesystem level using technologies such as eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, and low-level I/O optimization. Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize compute and storage infrastructure for demanding production workloads. Lead technically complex infrastructure initiatives from initial problem definition through architecture, implementation, and production delivery. Mentor experienced engineers and act as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization. Translate business and product priorities into longer-term infrastructure architecture and execution plans. Help establish engineering standards and influence how the platform evolves as infrastructure capacity and workload complexity increase.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in systems engineering, distributed infrastructure, or another closely related area
- Significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale production infrastructure
- Strong understanding of Linux and low-level systems engineering
- Experience working with bare-metal infrastructure, virtualization, distributed storage, or high-performance compute systems
- Strong architectural judgment and a track record of owning technically critical systems from design through production
- Experience improving the reliability, performance, or scalability of complex infrastructure
- Ability to operate as a highly autonomous senior individual contributor
- Experience influencing technical direction beyond your immediate area of ownership
- Strong problem-solving skills in environments where requirements and solutions are not always clearly defined
- A track record of raising engineering standards and supporting the development of other senior engineers
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with Go, Rust, or C
- Experience with virtualization technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor
- Experience with distributed storage systems such as Ceph or comparable technologies
- Deep familiarity with eBPF, cgroups, Linux namespaces, filesystems, or kernel-level performance optimization
- Experience operating large fleets of physical servers or other bare-metal infrastructure
- Previous experience in a fast-scaling infrastructure or developer-tools company
- Experience joining a high-growth technology company at an early stage and helping its infrastructure scale significantly
- Publications, conference presentations, patents, or meaningful open-source contributions relating to systems or infrastructure engineering
- Exposure to infrastructure supporting CI/CD, developer tooling, sandboxed compute, or AI workloads
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