Senior Systems Engineer

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Hands-on senior individual contributor who designs and delivers core infrastructure software for a large compute environment. Works side by side with technical leadership and a compact group of engineers, with ownership from initial concept through live operation.

What you'll do

• Architect, build and scale infrastructure software that runs across a large pool of physical servers.
• Take charge of difficult storage, networking and scheduling problems as demand and capacity grow quickly.
• Partner with technical leaders and a small team of engineers to solve open-ended infrastructure problems from the ground up.
• Write and tune performance-sensitive code in systems languages, prioritizing speed, correctness and dependability.
• Drive infrastructure initiatives from first design to production rollout, supporting new product capabilities and bigger accounts.
• Use AI coding assistants to speed up delivery and automate parts of the engineering workflow.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• At least 5 years of experience creating and growing distributed software close to the operating system.
• Direct experience with operating-system internals such as kernels, file systems or Linux building blocks, where you built core components yourself instead of stitching together managed cloud services.
• A history of owning substantial distributed systems in a startup or a small team with high autonomy, rather than in a large established company.
• Working knowledge of virtualization technology, such as QEMU or a lightweight hypervisor.
• Experience with distributed storage at significant scale.
• At least 2 years in an early-stage or high-autonomy company, owning a system from start to finish while it grew.
• Strong, practical fluency using AI coding agents in daily development.
• Comfort with ambiguity and with building things from nothing in a fast-moving setting.
• A strong individual contributor who can influence the direction of those around them.
• This is a builder role rather than a DevOps or SRE position.

Bonus points

• Systems programming experience in a language such as Go or Rust.
• Familiarity with configuration management tooling.
• Experience founding or scaling a well-known startup, or a record of publications, patents or conference talks.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: USD 200,000 to 300,000 per year
• Equity
• Health, dental and vision coverage
• Retirement plan with employer match
• Flexible time off
• Paid parental leave

Location and work model

• New York City, New York, United States
• On-site, 5 days per week in the office
• Full-time