Hybrid Remote
Senior / Staff Systems Engineer
Developer Infra Startup $200 000 - $300 000
New York - United States 🇺🇸
Developer Infra Startup We’re working with a high-growth developer infrastructure startup building a new category around CI workloads.
They run CI on their own fleet of bare-metal machines, orchestrating millions of VMs monthly with build caches co-located next to compute. The result is dramatically faster and cheaper pipelines.
The company is ~2 years old, already at strong ARR, and expanding into applied AI with a new coding agent product built on top of their infra.
What you’ll be working on
Building and scaling distributed systems powering CI workloads
Optimising performance across filesystem, networking, and storage layers
Operating large-scale compute clusters and distributed storage systems
Working directly with bare-metal infrastructure and VM orchestration
Contributing to a new AI coding agent platform
What they’re looking for
Strong hands-on experience building distributed systems in production
Proven work on performance-critical systems close to the metal
Comfortable writing/debugging in Go, Rust, C, C++, or Zig
Experience or strong interest in distributed storage (Ceph, MinIO, etc.)
Familiarity with infra tooling (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.)
2–10 years of experience
What actually matters (based on past hiring signal)
You’ve worked on low-level systems problems, not just high-level services
You’ve dealt with real performance or reliability bottlenecks (network, storage, filesystem)
You’ve operated in startup or high-ownership environments
You can clearly explain why this type of company and problem space
Ideal background
Systems / infrastructure engineer building core components (databases, storage, distributed services)
Experience at infra startups, systems companies, or high-scale environments
Big Tech is fine only if paired with real systems depth and ownership
Bonus: startup or founder experience
What makes this interesting
Work across compute, storage, and networking at the hardware level
Real scale: millions of VMs, large bare-metal fleets, distributed storage clusters
Strong product-market fit and fast growth
Early team, high bar, high ownership
0→1 AI product built on top of proven infrastructure
Practical details
Salary: $200K – $300K + equity
Location: NYC (4–5 days onsite)
Visa: Transfers + select sponsorship supported
Hiring multiple engineers
Screening expectations
You will be expected to clearly demonstrate:
Detailed systems experience (not surface-level)
Specific examples of performance / scaling challenges you solved
A clear, thoughtful answer to why this company and this problem space
Willingness to work in-person in NYC
Generic “interested in startups” answers are not sufficient.
Not a fit if
You’re primarily DevOps / platform without deep systems work
You prefer remote
You haven’t worked on low-level performance or distributed systems
You struggle to articulate why this role specifically
Apply
Send your resume to developer.infra@rustjobs.dev
Application process
- Your application goes directly to the Golang Cafe team. We manage hiring for this role on behalf of the company.
- Every CV is read by a human, not a filter. We assess it against the requirements before anything else happens.
- If your application is a strong fit, we'll reach out by email to introduce ourselves and walk you through the next steps with the company.
Application volume is high, so we can't reply to every candidate individually. If you haven't heard from us within 5 working days, please assume we're not moving forward on this occasion. Join our talent network to be considered for future roles.
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