Software Engineer (C++ Systems)

Software Engineering, C++ Programming Language, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Cloud Computing, C++ Programming Language, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Securities, Multithreaded Programming, Debugging Skills, Operating Systems, * Exceptional modern C++: memory management, concurrency, performance, and systems-level abstraction design

• Deep understanding of at least one of: operating systems, low-level networking, compilers, distributed systems, or computer architecture
• Experience building and running performance-critical C++ in production
• Strong Linux systems programming and debugging, and the ability to reason across unfamiliar layers of the stack
• Ownership: you push a project from prototype to 100% done under tight deadlines, ship well-tested code without much oversight, and are happy to work directly with customers on hard production failures

Nice to have: CUDA or GPU systems, high-performance networking, distributed computing, compilers, or dynamic linking. Background at a trading firm (Citadel Securities, Jane Street, etc.), a hardware or AI infra company (NVIDIA, SambaNova, etc.), or a systems research group. Competitive programming, open-source, or research that shows strong fundamentals.

Logistics

Full-time, in person five days a week at our office in downtown San Francisco. Relocation support and visa sponsorship available.

Compensation: $250-325K base, 0.1-0.3% equity, profit-sharing bonus pool (founders excluded). Visa sponsorship and relocation available.

What the work looks like

• Remove microseconds from latency-critical paths that cross process and machine boundaries.
• Build high-performance networking and data-transfer paths.
• Keep low-level runtime code correct under fork, signals, multithreading, and dynamic linking, inside workloads we don”t control.
• Debug production failures that span the OS, the network, and the GPU, with no repro and no playbook.
• Design allocation, scheduling, failure recovery, and observability across a GPU fleet.
• Take new systems research from a paper or prototype into production.

It”s the hardest parts of systems research and production engineering at the same time. One week you”re tracing a synchronization bug across a distributed workload; the next, you”re redesigning a hot path., Profit sharing: a bonus pool paid out twice a year that grows with gross profit, plus $3.3M in near-term bonuses unlocked at gross-profit milestones, split by performance.

Daily lunch, dinner when in-office, snacks, and coffee. Offsites and team events. 401(k). Health, dental, and vision insurance.

Thunder Compute runs a GPU cloud on systems software we built from scratch in C++. It lets us get far more out of every GPU than the rest of the market., Series A, with more than $17.5M raised from Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, and angels from CoreWeave, Microsoft, Cognition, and Anthropic. Small team, live in production with real customers, in downtown San Francisco.