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