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.