Staff Systems Engineer

This is a senior individual-contributor opportunity for an exceptional systems engineer who has architected and delivered mission-critical infrastructure at scale. You’ll work closely with technical co-founders while owning architectural direction across distributed compute, virtualization, storage, and bare-metal infrastructure., * Own and drive architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms operating tens of millions of virtual machines monthly.

• Take ownership of production reliability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence as compute capacity rapidly expands.
• Partner directly with technical co-founders to translate product and business strategy into long-term technical roadmaps.
• Design and build systems at the kernel and filesystem level, including work with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, and low-level I/O optimization.
• Build and optimize distributed infrastructure operating at petabyte scale.
• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from initial problem definition through architecture, implementation, and production delivery.
• Solve highly ambiguous engineering problems where both the problem and technical solution may need to be defined.
• Mentor senior engineers and serve as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.
• Establish and elevate engineering standards as the platform and team continue to scale.

• Staff-level or equivalent experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure.
• Proven experience personally architecting and delivering critical production systems.
• Deep understanding of Linux systems, kernel-level engineering, virtualization, distributed storage, and bare-metal infrastructure.
• Strong experience with technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, eBPF, cgroups, and namespaces.
• Strong programming experience with Go, Rust, and/or C.
• Experience optimizing performance, storage, networking, or I/O at significant scale.
• Demonstrated ability to materially influence the technical direction of an engineering organization as a senior individual contributor.
• Ability to independently lead complex, ambiguous infrastructure initiatives from concept through production.
• Strong technical leadership and mentoring capabilities.

Highly valued: Experience joining a high-growth technology company early and helping its infrastructure scale substantially. Publications, patents, open-source contributions, or conference presentations related to systems engineering are also a plus.

Base Salary: $280,000-$380,000 Equity: Competitive equity package

The platform currently orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each month across a global bare-metal fleet and is undergoing significant compute expansion.