Senior Systems Engineer

Epic Placements; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health coverage

Retirement benefits

Flexible time off

Parental leave

Relocation assistance

Visa transfers

AI development tools access

Job summary

Epic Placements is seeking a senior infrastructure engineer in New York City to design, implement, and scale core systems. You will work on distributed storage, scheduling, virtualization, networking, and Linux-based stacks, in a small, technically focused team.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years building infrastructure, with hands-on experience across distributed systems and performance-critical backends. The role is onsite in NYC, with equity and growth opportunities.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience with ownership of complex infrastructure or distributed systems.
• Built core infrastructure or distributed systems with measurable impact.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or C/C++ is helpful; deep stack understanding required.

Responsibilities

• Own problems end-to-end: design, implementation, production, debugging, optimization, and scale.
• Work as a senior IC with a small, highly technical team.
• Contribute to AI-assisted engineering initiatives and agent-based workflows.

Skills

Distributed systems

Storage

Compute scheduling

Virtualization

Networking

Linux

Go

Rust

C/C++

Performance

Job description

New York City | Onsite | $200K–$300K Base + Equity

There are infrastructure jobs where you manage systems.

And there are infrastructure jobs where you actually build them.

This is the second kind.

We’re working with a fast-growing infrastructure startup building the compute layer behind modern developer workloads. The platform operates across a large fleet of physical machines and handles highly distributed, performance-sensitive workloads at serious production scale.

The engineering team is intentionally small, deeply technical, and still early enough that one strong engineer can meaningfully influence the architecture.

They're looking for another one.

What You'll Work On

This is core systems engineering.

Depending on your background, you could be working across:

• Distributed systems and storage
• Compute scheduling and resource management
• Virtualization and workload isolation
• Networking and performance
• Linux and lower-level infrastructure
• Infrastructure supporting emerging AI and agent-based development workflows

You'll own problems end-to-end — design, implementation, production, debugging, optimization, and scale.

There aren't many layers here.

If something difficult needs to get built, the expectation is that strong engineers can get close to the problem and figure it out.

Who We're Looking For

We're less interested in checking every technology box and more interested in what you've actually built.

The strongest candidates typically have 5+ years of experience and can point to meaningful ownership of complex infrastructure or distributed systems.

You may have worked on things like:

• Distributed databases or storage systems
• Filesystems or storage engines
• Schedulers or compute infrastructure
• Virtualization or container runtimes
• Cloud or bare-metal platforms
• Networking infrastructure
• Build systems or developer infrastructure
• Performance-critical backend systems

Experience with systems-oriented languages such as Go, Rust, C/C++, or similar is helpful.

More important is that you've worked deep enough in the stack to understand performance, concurrency, reliability, resource constraints, and failure modes.

This Probably Isn't a DevOps Role

If your background is primarily cloud configuration, Terraform, deployment pipelines, monitoring, or maintaining infrastructure built by somebody else, this likely won't be the right fit.

They're looking for someone who has built the underlying systems themselves.

That's an important distinction.

The Environment

This is a senior individual-contributor role.

You'll work directly with a small group of very strong engineers and technical founders, with very little organizational distance between an idea and actually building it.

The company moves quickly, ownership is broad, and the architecture is still evolving.

They’re also pushing hard on AI-assisted engineering and are particularly interested in engineers experimenting seriously with coding agents and increasingly autonomous development workflows.

You don't need to have everything figured out there.

You should be curious about where it's going.

You’ll Probably Like This If...

You enjoy difficult technical problems more than big-company process.

You can talk in detail about something complicated you personally built.

You've had to debug systems where the obvious answer wasn't the right answer.

You want to stay hands-on.

And you'd rather own a meaningful chunk of an evolving platform than a very small piece of a massive organization.

Location & Compensation

This team works together five days per week in New York City.

Relocation assistance may be available for the right candidate.

Eligible visa transfers may also be considered.

Benefits include comprehensive health coverage, retirement benefits, flexible time off, parental leave, equity, and generous access to modern AI development tools.

The Bottom Line

This isn't a role for someone who simply wants another infrastructure job.

It's for an engineer who has built hard systems before and wants to do it again — on a smaller team, with more ownership, and with considerably less distance between their work and the outcome.