Staff Systems Engineer

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. Youll 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Base Salary: $280000$380000
Equity: Competitive equity package

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 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.

The company is looking to hire 15 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.