Software Engineer, Systems

Meta; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta is seeking a Systems Software Engineer to design, build, and optimize low-level infrastructure and platform software at massive scale. You will own the technical design of complex components spanning OS, runtime, networking, and storage, partnering with infrastructure, hardware, and product teams to enable reliable Meta services.

You will mentor engineers, drive performance and security improvements, and shape testing strategies across the system stack to prevent regressions and enable

Qualifications

• 6+ years in systems software engineering across OS, distributed systems, networking or storage.
• 6+ years writing production-grade systems code in C, C++, Rust, or Go.
• Experience designing architecture of complex systems with performance and reliability trade-offs.
• Expertise in performance profiling, instrumentation, and optimization of systems code.
• Experience operating production systems at scale with incident response and RCAs.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement systems-level software components at scale, including kernel interfaces and platform services.
• Own architecture of systems projects from requirements to deployment with trade-off analysis.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths to meet latency and throughput targets.
• Build observability infrastructure with SLAs, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks.
• Investigate complex incidents and drive retrospective improvements.
• Develop and enforce testing strategies for unit, integration, and resiliency tests.
• Coordinate across infrastructure and platform teams to unblock large initiatives.
• Incorporate privacy, security, and integrity principles at the platform layer.
• Mentor engineers in design, debugging, and best practices; contribute to recruiting.
• Reduce technical debt and drive migrations to simplify the systems codebase.

Skills

Systems programming

C/C++/Rust/Go

Distributed systems

Performance profiling

Reliability engineering

Job description

Meta is seeking a Systems Software Engineer to design, build, and optimize the low-level infrastructure and platform software that powers Meta's products at massive scale. In this role, you will work on systems-level challenges spanning operating systems, runtime environments, networking stacks, storage infrastructure, or compute platform software. You will own the technical design and execution of complex systems components, drive engineering excellence across reliability, performance, and security, and partner closely with infrastructure, hardware, and product engineering teams to deliver foundational capabilities that enable Meta's services to operate efficiently and reliably at global scale.

Software Engineer, Systems Responsibilities:

• Design and implement systems-level software components including kernel interfaces, runtime systems, networking layers, storage subsystems, or platform services that operate at scale
• Own the technical architecture of systems projects from requirements definition through production deployment, including trade-off analysis, design documentation, and stakeholder alignment
• Profile and optimize critical code paths using instrumentation, tracing, and performance analysis tools to meet latency, throughput, and resource efficiency targets
• Build and maintain robust observability infrastructure including service level objectives, dashboards, alerting, and runbooks to ensure production reliability
• Investigate and resolve complex systems-level incidents, including non-reproducible bugs, race conditions, and multithreaded synchronization issues, and drive retrospective improvements
• Develop and enforce testing strategies including unit, integration, stress, and resiliency tests to prevent regressions and validate system behavior under failure conditions
• Drive cross-team technical initiatives by identifying dependencies, coordinating with partner infrastructure and platform teams, and unblocking execution across organizational boundaries
• Proactively incorporate privacy, security, and integrity principles into systems design, including threat modeling, access control, and secure data handling at the platform layer
• Mentor other engineers on systems design principles, debugging methodologies, and engineering best practices, and contribute to recruiting and technical program initiatives
• Identify and eliminate sources of technical debt, improve developer tooling and automation, and drive migrations that reduce legacy complexity across the systems codebase

Minimum Qualifications:

• 6+ years of experience in systems software engineering, including work on operating systems, distributed systems, networking, storage, or low-level platform infrastructure
• 6+ years of experience writing production-quality code in systems programming languages such as C, C++, Rust, or Go
• Experience designing and owning the architecture of complex systems components, including evaluation of trade-offs across performance, reliability, and maintainability
• Experience with performance profiling, instrumentation, and optimization of systems-level code including memory management, concurrency, and I/O efficiency
• Experience building and operating production systems at scale, including incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability engineering practices

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in large scale open web crawling ecosystem
• Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
• Experience contributing to open-source systems projects or publishing technical work related to operating systems, distributed systems, or platform infrastructure
• Experience with kernel development, hypervisor internals, container runtimes, or low-level networking protocols such as RDMA, DPDK, or eBPF
• Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies
• Experience designing systems for high availability and fault tolerance, including overload protection, graceful degradation, and automated failover mechanisms
• Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
• Experience applying security hardening techniques at the systems level, including sandboxing, privilege separation, or secure inter-process communication

About Meta:

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today - beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.

Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.