Senior Systems Engineer (Storage & Infrastructure)

About the Role

Roles at Hugging Face are very fluid and dynamic -- we're looking for someone who is comfortable taking on different challenges that evolve over time. This role sits on the Xet Storage team, the group responsible for the storage system behind all of Hugging Face. Today we store over 200PB (and growing rapidly!) of the world's most important ML & AI assets. Xet is the underlying storage architecture for the entire Hugging Face platform and community -- from the largest model repositories to the datasets and Spaces that millions of people build on every day.

In this role, you'll work across two closely connected surfaces. You'll contribute to xet-core , our open-source project written in Rust that powers hf-xet -- the Python library underpinning the Hugging Face Hub client and the wider ecosystem of open-source tools the community relies on. And you'll design, build, and operate meaningful and challenging features in the Xet Storage backend, contributing to the broader Infrastructure organization at Hugging Face. We're a small team building and operating incredible things at enormous scale, in a high-trust, low-process, async, and remote environment -- and we lean heavily on the latest AI tools to move fast.

If you love writing low-level, high-performance code and are energized by the challenge of large-scale, scalable services, this is the team for you. This usually means proven experience building and operating production systems software, but we consider every applicant on an individual basis.

Requirements

What we're looking for

• 8+ years building and scaling distributed systems, storage, or networking infrastructure.
• Proficiency in a low-level systems language, with Rust strongly preferred (we also work in Python , Typescript , Go , and C++ across the stack).
• A track record of working independently in a high-trust, low-process environment -- you're comfortable with ambiguity and take ownership end to end.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, async, and fully remote environment.
• A passion for building simple, robust, and scalable systems relied on by engineering and science teams around the world.

Bonus points if you have

• Experience designing efficient, high-performance, fault-tolerant data storage and retrieval systems.
• Experience operating production systems -- monitoring, alerting, and distributed debugging and recovery.
• Familiarity with git internals, cloud infrastructure ( AWS , Azure , GCP , Kubernetes ), databases (relational and non-relational), or networking.

About You

If you love open-source, are excited by the intersection of low-level performance work and large-scale services, and want your code to sit at the foundation of the world's largest platform for AI builders, then we can't wait to see your application!

If you're interested in joining us, but don't tick every box above, we still encourage you to apply! We're building a diverse team whose skills, experiences, and backgrounds complement one another. We're happy to consider where you might be able to make the biggest impact.

Benefits

More about Hugging Face

We are actively working to build a culture that values diversity, equity, and inclusivity. We are intentionally building a workplace where people feel respected and supported—regardless of who you are or where you come from. We believe this is foundational to building a great company and community. Hugging Face is an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We value development. You will work with some of the smartest people in our industry. We are an organization that has a bias for impact and is always challenging ourselves to continuously grow. We provide all employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.

We care about your well-being. We offer flexible working hours and remote options. We offer health, dental, and vision benefits for employees and their dependents. We also offer parental leave and flexible paid time off.

We support our employees wherever they are. While we have office spaces in NYC and Paris, we're very distributed and all remote employees have the opportunity to visit our offices. If needed, we'll also outfit your workstation to ensure you succeed.

We want our teammates to be shareholders. All employees have company equity as part of their compensation package. If we succeed in becoming a category-defining platform in machine learning and artificial intelligence, everyone enjoys the upside.

We support the community. We believe major scientific advancements are the result of collaboration across the field. Join a community supporting the ML/AI community.