Staff Systems Engineer

About the job Staff Systems Engineer


Staff Systems Engineer - Distributed Infrastructure

New York City | On-Site
$280K-$380K Base + Competitive Equity | Full-Time

GPF Staffing is recruiting a Staff Systems Engineer for a rapidly scaling technology company building high-performance distributed infrastructure at massive scale.

This is a senior individual-contributor opportunity for an exceptional systems engineer who has architected and delivered mission-critical infrastructure at scale. You'll work closely with technical co-founders while owning architectural direction across distributed compute, virtualization, storage, and bare-metal infrastructure.

The platform currently orchestrates tens of millions of Firecracker VMs each month across a global bare-metal fleet and is undergoing significant compute expansion.

What You'll Do

• Own and drive architectural direction for critical infrastructure platforms operating tens of millions of virtual machines monthly.
• Take ownership of production reliability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence as compute capacity rapidly expands.
• Partner directly with technical co-founders to translate product and business strategy into long-term technical roadmaps.
• Design and build systems at the kernel and filesystem level , including work with eBPF, cgroups, namespaces, and low-level I/O optimization.
• Build and optimize distributed infrastructure operating at petabyte scale .
• Lead complex infrastructure initiatives from initial problem definition through architecture, implementation, and production delivery.
• Solve highly ambiguous engineering problems where both the problem and technical solution may need to be defined.
• Mentor senior engineers and serve as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.
• Establish and elevate engineering standards as the platform and team continue to scale.

What We're Looking For

• Staff-level or equivalent experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure .
• Proven experience personally architecting and delivering critical production systems.
• Deep understanding of Linux systems, kernel-level engineering, virtualization, distributed storage, and bare-metal infrastructure .
• Strong experience with technologies such as Firecracker, QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, Ceph, eBPF, cgroups, and namespaces .
• Strong programming experience with Go, Rust, and/or C .
• Experience optimizing performance, storage, networking, or I/O at significant scale.
• Demonstrated ability to materially influence the technical direction of an engineering organization as a senior individual contributor.
• Ability to independently lead complex, ambiguous infrastructure initiatives from concept through production.
• Strong technical leadership and mentoring capabilities.

Highly valued: Experience joining a high-growth technology company early and helping its infrastructure scale substantially. Publications, patents, open-source contributions, or conference presentations related to systems engineering are also a plus.

Technology Environment

Go | Rust | C | Linux | Firecracker | QEMU | Cloud Hypervisor | Ceph | eBPF | cgroups | namespaces | Bare-Metal Infrastructure | Distributed Systems | GitHub Actions

Compensation

Base Salary: $280,000-$380,000
Equity: Competitive equity package

Location

New York City, NY

This is an on-site position . Relocation assistance may be available for exceptional candidates who are willing to relocate to New York City.

Visa Eligibility

Visa transfers may be supported for candidates who already hold a valid U.S. work visa that is eligible for transfer, including qualifying H-1B transfers and OPT candidates .

The employer is not able to sponsor new visas due to current processing timelines.

Hiring

The company is looking to hire 1-5 exceptional engineers for this team.

This opportunity is particularly suited for a deeply technical Staff-level IC who wants architecture-level ownership while remaining hands-on with some of the most challenging problems in distributed compute, virtualization, Linux systems, and large-scale infrastructure.