Senior Systems Engineer

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.

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

Health, dental and vision coverage

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

Compensation, As The Posting Describes It

Equity

Retirement plan with employer match

Flexible time off