Senior Systems Engineering

Our client is looking for a Senior Systems Engineer to help refine the foundations of their platform and build the next generation of agent-first data infrastructure. You will join at a stage where engineers have a large influence and ownership on both the product and the engineering culture.
The bigger picture: today's leading data platforms were built for teams of human data scientists. Our client is building the next generation of that stack for a world where the primary user is a swarm of AI agents working on the same data at once, which means rebuilding storage, compute, and governance from first principles.

This role is based in NYC and flex-hybrid (around 3 days/week), as the company consolidates its core engineering team there (relocation welcome). This is one of several senior/tech-lead engineering roles the company is hiring right now as the team doubles.

You will work closely with experienced systems builders, database researchers, product designers, and the founding team to design and implement performant systems for running data workloads over object storage.

You will work across product abstractions, distributed systems, data management, and developer tooling. In their world that means someone who makes the call on technical decisions in their area and owns the outcome, while continuing to write code hands-on (under no circumstances does this person stop writing code). they're looking for IC depth and technical ownership, and, ideally, someone who can help hire and mentor the rest of the team.

Design systems that allow users to safely run, inspect, verify, and modify production-scale data workloads.
Implement performant systems for executing Rust, Python and SQL workloads over object storage.
Improve the quality, security, observability, and iteration speed of the overall codebase.
Help customers diagnose issues, debug workloads, and understand system behavior.
Share work with engineering and research communities through talks, papers, blog posts, and open-source releases.

Get comfortable with the architecture, codebase, tooling, and deployment process.
Ship a small feature or meaningful improvement.
Take ownership of one area of the platform and contribute actively to technical decisions.
Debug real production issues and improve reliability, performance, or developer experience.
Start working with junior members of the team, establishing trust and shared engineering standards.
You are an experienced engineer who enjoys building simple abstractions over complex distributed systems. Their lingua franca is Python, and they use a lot of Rust, but they're open to anyone who can demonstrate outstanding equivalent experience in relevant systems.
Concurrency, asynchronous programming, fault tolerance, and failure recovery.
Building cloud-based infrastructure.
Modern software-engineering practices, including Git, containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, testing, security, and observability.
Reading and writing technical design documents.
Taking ownership of ambiguous problems from initial requirements through production operation.
SQL and relational data systems.
Object storage and cloud-native storage architectures.
Database internals, query planning, execution engines, or optimization.
Transaction processing, Apache Iceberg, or data catalogs.
Infrastructure for coding agents, agent evaluation, or autonomous software development.