Senior Systems Software Engineer

About Us

Zoo is building the next generation of hardware design tools redefining how hardware products are designed, developed, and built. Our platform combines a modern, cloud-native CAD environment with AI-powered engineering workflows, helping teams design, iterate, and manufacture products faster than ever before. We are headquartered in Los Angeles, CA with both a local and remote team. We were founded and incubated by Embedded Ventures in 2021.
About You

We're looking for curious, innovative, and ambitious self-starters to join our growing team to help us bring our mission to life. We think you'll thrive on our team if you're:

• Curious at your core, with an eagerness to learn and do things differently
• Customer-focused, always thinking about ways to improve the user experience
• Able to operate autonomously and work asynchronously, while also being an effective team player

About The Role

We're looking for a Senior Systems Software Engineer who can take ownership of the reliability, automation, and evolution of our core systems. You'll work across the stack, with a strong emphasis on backend, infrastructure, and system-level engineering, to strengthen the foundations that everything else runs on. This role is for someone who enjoys digging into complex systems, building the tooling and automation that keep them running smoothly, and stepping in anywhere (including the frontend) when something needs fixing.
What You'll Do

• Design, implement, and maintain core systems and services that support our platform's reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Build automation and tooling that reduce operational overhead, improve developer workflows, and enforce system-level consistency.
• Develop integrations between our systems and external platforms (e.g., billing, CRM, authentication, analytics).
• Improve observability, monitoring, and alerting across services to ensure strong operational visibility.
• Architect and maintain infrastructure components (e.g., distributed services, data pipelines, deployment automation).
• Contribute to security-focused systems work, such as permissions controls, access flows, and auditability.
• Troubleshoot issues across services and layers, backend, infrastructure, and occasionally frontend, taking full ownership from diagnosis to resolution.
• Jump into frontend code as needed to close the loop on system-level changes or fix issues that block broader system reliability.

What You'll Need

• B.S. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Strong professional experience in systems, platform, or infrastructure engineering.
• Proficiency in Rust with a solid understanding of systems-level programming.
• Solid experience with databases (transactional & analytical) including schema design, performance tuning, migrations, and operational reliability.
• Strong understanding of API design, data flows, and service integrations.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems or service-oriented architectures.
• Comfort working with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments.
• Ability to work autonomously and make high-leverage technical decisions in a fast-moving environment.
• A bias toward automation and building tools that remove friction.

Nice to Have

• Experience with frontend development (JavaScript/React) for occasional UI-level fixes.
• Background with billing systems (Stripe) or CRM platforms.
• Experience building internal tooling, permissions systems, or developer productivity infrastructure.
• Familiarity with CAD-adjacent workflows or domain-specific data pipelines.

The salary range for this role is provided below. The final offer will depend on multiple factors including candidate experience, skills, expertise, and market data. Compensation may vary by geography. In addition to salary, we offer competitive equity as well as a full benefits package which may vary by geography as well.

Salary Range

$145,000-$195,000 USD

Zoo is an equal-opportunity employer committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. The Zoo team is made up of incredibly talented and unique individuals from across the globe. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, Veteran status, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. We encourage everyone interested in our mission to apply!