We are hiring a Senior Systems Engineer for a fast-scaling, early-stage AI infrastructure startup. 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 large-scale virtual machine workloads 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.
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.
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.
- 5+ years of experience in systems engineering or distributed systems development
- Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations
- Early-stage startup experience with meaningful tenure (2+ years)
- Low-level systems engineering experience (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives)
- Systems programming in Go, Rust, or C/C++
- Virtualization technologies (Firecracker, QEMU, or Cloud Hypervisor)
- Distributed storage systems at scale (e.g., Ceph)
- Configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef)
- Mastery of AI coding agents for development workflows
- Strong IC track record influencing engineering team direction and trajectory
- Comfortable with ambiguity and building from scratch in a rapidly scaling startup
- This is not a DevOps/SRE role: must have built systems, not only managed hyperscale infrastructure