Senior Systems Engineer

Senior Systems Engineer New York City | Onsite | $200K–$300K Base + Equity There are infrastructure jobs where you manage systems. And there are infrastructure jobs where you actually build them. This is the second kind. We’re working with a fast-growing infrastructure startup building the compute layer behind modern developer workloads. The platform operates across a large fleet of physical machines and handles highly distributed, performance-sensitive workloads at serious production scale. The engineering team is intentionally small, deeply technical, and still early enough that one strong engineer can meaningfully influence the architecture. They're looking for another one. What You'll Work On This is core systems engineering. Depending on your background, you could be working across: Distributed systems and storageCompute scheduling and resource managementVirtualization and workload isolationNetworking and performanceLinux and lower-level infrastructureHigh-concurrency, ephemeral workloadsInfrastructure supporting emerging AI and agent-based development workflows You'll own problems end-to-end — design, implementation, production, debugging, optimization, and scale. There aren't many layers here. If something difficult needs to get built, the expectation is that strong engineers can get close to the problem and figure it out. Who We're Looking For We're less interested in checking every technology box and more interested in what you've actually built. The strongest candidates typically have 5+ years of experience and can point to meaningful ownership of complex infrastructure or distributed systems. You may have worked on things like: Distributed databases or storage systemsFilesystems or storage enginesSchedulers or compute infrastructureVirtualization or container runtimesCloud or bare-metal platformsNetworking infrastructureBuild systems or developer infrastructurePerformance-critical backend systems Experience with systems-oriented languages such as Go, Rust, C/C++, or similar is helpful. More important is that you've worked deep enough in the stack to understand performance, concurrency, reliability, resource constraints, and failure modes. This Probably Isn't a DevOps Role If your background is primarily cloud configuration, Terraform, deployment pipelines, monitoring, or maintaining infrastructure built by somebody else, this likely won't be the right fit. They're looking for someone who has built the underlying systems themselves. That's an important distinction. The Environment This is a senior individual-contributor role. You'll work directly with a small group of very strong engineers and technical founders, with very little organizational distance between an idea and actually building it. The company moves quickly, ownership is broad, and the architecture is still evolving. They're also pushing hard on AI-assisted engineering and are particularly interested in engineers experimenting seriously with coding agents and increasingly autonomous development workflows. You don't need to have everything figured out there. You should be curious about where it's going. You'll Probably Like This If... You enjoy difficult technical problems more than big-company process. You can talk in detail about something complicated you personally built. You've had to debug systems where the obvious answer wasn't the right answer. You want to stay hands-on. And you'd rather own a meaningful chunk of an evolving platform than a very small piece of a massive organization. Location & Compensation This team works together five days per week in New York City. Relocation assistance may be available for the right candidate. Eligible visa transfers may also be considered. Base salary: $200K–$300K + equity Benefits include comprehensive health coverage, retirement benefits, flexible time off, parental leave, equity, and generous access to modern AI development tools. The Bottom Line This isn't a role for someone who simply wants another infrastructure job. It's for an engineer who has built hard systems before and wants to do it again — on a smaller team, with more ownership, and with considerably less distance between their work and the outcome. If that's the kind of engineering environment you're looking for, let's talk!