Staff Systems Engineer (Low Level / Distributed Infrastructure)

Staff Systems Engineer | New York | $280k to $380k + seven figure equity potential Own the systems layer that makes CI fast. If you have opinions about kernels, caching and why builds are slow, read on. Location: New York City, NY (on-site, relocation support available) Type: Permanent Salary: $280,000 to $380,000 base, plus significant equity Key skills: Linux kernel, eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, Go, Rust, C, Firecracker, KVM, QEMU, Ceph, distributed storage, bare metal, virtualisation, AI coding agents A rapidly scaling, venture-backed developer infrastructure business is hiring Staff level systems engineers to own the architecture behind one of the fastest growing compute platforms in the US market. The platform runs millions of workloads every week across a self-owned global fleet of bare metal machines, using microVM virtualisation and a self-managed petabyte scale distributed storage layer. Compute capacity is about to be tripled to support enterprise demand, and the platform is expanding into agent sandboxing and autonomous coding tooling. This is a senior individual contributor role reporting directly to the technical co-founders. No management layers, no legacy estate, full architectural ownership. What you will do Own architectural direction for the core infrastructure platform: bare metal fleet management, microVM orchestration and petabyte scale distributed storageTake end to end ownership of production reliability and performance as compute capacity triplesBuild at the kernel and filesystem level using eBPF, cgroups, namespaces and low level I/O tuningLead ambiguous, high complexity initiatives from problem definition to deliveryTranslate product and commercial strategy into a long term technical roadmap alongside the technical foundersRaise the engineering bar and act as a force multiplier for a small, elite team What you will need 8+ years in low level systems or distributed infrastructure engineeringDemonstrable personal ownership of business critical systems at a recognised, high calibre engineering organisationSystems programming in Go, Rust or C/C++Hands-on Linux internals: kernel, filesystems, eBPF, cgroups, namespacesVirtualisation experience such as Firecracker, KVM, QEMU or Cloud HypervisorDistributed storage at scale, Ceph or equivalentFluency with AI coding agents as part of your daily engineering workflow Nice to have Early engineer at a start-up that went on to become an industry namePublications, patents or conference speaking in systems engineering Important notes On-site in New York City. Relocation assistance available for exceptional candidatesVisa transfers considered (for example OPT or H1B transfer). New sponsorships are not possibleThis is a builder role, not a platform operations role. Candidates from primarily DevOps or SRE backgrounds without evidence of building systems themselves will not be shortlisted