Senior Systems Software Engineer

Jobtailor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking an experienced Systems Engineer to design and implement system-level components for blockchain infrastructure. The role emphasizes high-throughput, low-latency services, distributed systems, and secure networking protocols, with responsibilities spanning API specification, performance profiling, and CI/CD integration.

You will collaborate with product, infra, and legal teams to mature fault-tolerant pipelines and scalable server fleets, both on‑prem and cloud, while

Qualifications

• Master's degree in CS or related field.
• 10 years of Systems/Software Engineering experience.
• Experience with distributed systems and low-level programming.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement system-level components for blockchain infrastructure.
• Maintain a strong emphasis on computer systems analysis and implementation.
• Gather requirements for high-throughput, low-latency services; design distributed systems that meet 99.9% availability SLAs.
• Perform benchmarking and performance profiling to enhance execution efficiency.
• Specify, version, and maintain public and internal APIs plus JSON‑RPC/gRPC endpoints.
• Document interfaces and generate strongly typed client libraries.
• Collaborate on the development of secure, low‑latency networking protocols and cryptographic primitives.
• Build fault‑tolerant ETL pipelines that transform on‑chain events into query‑optimized relational & NoSQL stores.
• Tune indexes for millisecond reads.
• Provision and scale commodity server fleets (on‑prem & cloud).
• Automate with Terraform/Kubernetes, monitor health, capacity, and SLOs.
• Migrate legacy computing pipelines to modern CI/CD frameworks.
• Support the design of fault‑tolerant systems with advanced debugging, logging, and error recovery functionality.
• Model token‑economic incentives, auction fee markets, and validator/operator behaviors; prototype algorithms and run agent‑based simulations.
• Leverage generative‑AI coding agents, static analyzers, and self‑healing runbooks to accelerate delivery and cut MTTR.
• Review performance metrics to refine software components for memory and process efficiency.
• Profile CPU, I/O, and network paths; execute load‑tests; instrument metrics/tracing/logs; drive post‑mortems and capacity plans.
• Maintain and manage a performant suite of APIs, SDKs, and developer tools for consumption by external developers.
• Integrate cryptographic primitives, secure key management, vulnerability scanning, and incident response playbooks.
• Write RFCs, lead design reviews, mentor junior engineers, and coordinate cross‑functional delivery with product, infra, and legal teams.

Skills

C

C++

Rust

Distributed systems

Performance optimization

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Hardware interfacing

Networking protocols

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Responsibilities

• Design and implement system-level components for blockchain infrastructure using C, C++, and Rust.
• Maintain a strong emphasis on computer systems analysis and implementation.
• Gather requirements for high-throughput, low-latency (≤ 200 ms p95) services; design distributed systems that meet 99.9 % availability SLAs.
• Perform benchmarking and performance profiling to enhance execution efficiency.
• Specify, version, and maintain public and internal APIs plus JSON‑RPC/gRPC endpoints.
• Document interfaces and generate strongly typed client libraries.
• Collaborate on the development of secure, low‑latency networking protocols and cryptographic primitives.
• Build fault‑tolerant ETL pipelines that transform on‑chain events into query‑optimized relational & NoSQL stores.
• Tune indexes for millisecond reads.
• Provision and scale commodity server fleets (on‑prem & cloud).
• Automate with Terraform/Kubernetes, monitor health, capacity, and SLOs.
• Migrate legacy computing pipelines to modern CI/CD frameworks.
• Support the design of fault‑tolerant systems with advanced debugging, logging, and error recovery functionality.
• Model token‑economic incentives, auction fee markets, and validator/operator behaviors; prototype algorithms and run agent‑based simulations.
• Leverage generative‑AI coding agents, static analyzers, and self‑healing runbooks to accelerate delivery and cut MTTR.
• Review performance metrics to refine software components for memory and process efficiency.
• Profile CPU, I/O, and network paths; execute load‑tests; instrument metrics/tracing/logs; drive post‑mortems and capacity plans.
• Maintain and manage a performant suite of APIs, SDKs, and developer tools for consumption by external developers.
• Integrate cryptographic primitives, secure key management, vulnerability scanning, and incident response playbooks.
• Write RFCs, lead design reviews, mentor junior engineers, and coordinate cross‑functional delivery with product, infra, and legal teams.

Requirements

• This position requires a Master’s degree, or foreign equivalent, in Economics, Business Economics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 10 years of experience as a Systems Engineer, Software Engineer, Software Developer, Information Technology Officer, or a related occupation.
• Systems programming in C, C++, and Rust.
• Low‑level performance optimization and hardware interfacing.
• Distributed systems and threading runtimes.
• CI/CD pipeline design using GitHub Actions and on-prem infrastructure.
• Work with multiple systems, including web development platforms, high‑performance computing systems, core operating system kernels, developer tools, and systems related to economic applications.
• Develop distributed ledger technologies or crypto‑economic distributed systems.