Staff Systems Engineer Company: Confidential — venture-backed technology company Location: New York, NY (on-site; relocation assistance for exceptional candidates) Compensation: $280,000 - $380,000 + competitive equity Employment Type: Full-time Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers only (must hold a transferable US work visa) About the Company The client started by making CI workloads run much faster: its first product runs GitHub Actions substantially faster and cheaper on its own global fleet of bare-metal machines instead of rented cloud VMs. It now orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month for 3,000+ companies, schedules 100k+ vCPUs concurrently, and runs a petabyte-scale Ceph cluster it manages itself. The client reached about $10M ARR in under two years, has grown revenue more than 5x since the start of 2026, and has raised $58.5M through its Series B. The Role The client is hiring a Staff-level systems engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed infrastructure. You will work at the kernel level with bare-metal machines, virtualization and distributed storage, own the architecture of critical platforms, and change the technical direction of the team as a senior IC while the client triples its compute capacity. What You Will Do • Own the architecture of infrastructure platforms that orchestrate tens of millions of Firecracker VMs a month across a global bare-metal fleet. • Own production outcomes (reliability, performance, operational excellence) as compute capacity triples. • Translate business and product strategy into long-term technical roadmaps with the technical co-founders. • Build at the kernel and filesystem level with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces and low-level I/O tuning to optimize performance at petabyte scale. • Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from problem definition through delivery. • Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards. What You Bring • 8+ years in low-level systems or distributed infrastructure engineering • Built and owned large-scale distributed systems at recognized, prestigious organizations • Staff/Principal-level IC who materially changed a team's technical direction • Low-level systems work (kernel, filesystems, Linux primitives): building the substrate, not building on managed cloud • Startup or high-growth scale-up experience with small teams • Solid tenure with clearly delivered impact • Mastery of AI coding agents in your workflow Nice to Have • Systems programming in Go, Rust or C/C++ • Virtualization (Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor) • Distributed storage at scale (e.g. Ceph) • Publications, patents or conference talks Interview Process Recruiter screen (30 min), two systems technical interviews (1 hour each), on-site day, final chat with the CEO (30 min). Tech Stack Go, Rust, C, Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, Linux, eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, bare-metal infrastructure, GitHub Actions Before you apply: get a free recruiter-readiness score for your resume at CareerStanding — about a minute, no signup, and your resume stays in your browser.