Staff Systems Engineer

Global Placement Firm; New York (NY); On-site; USD 280,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Job summary

GPF Staffing is recruiting a Staff Systems Engineer for a rapidly scaling tech company building high-performance distributed infrastructure in New York City. This senior IC will own architectural direction across compute, virtualization, storage, and bare-metal layers, and mentor engineers.

The role focuses on millions of Firecracker VMs monthly, petabyte-scale workflows, and close collaboration with technical co-founders to drive architecture and production delivery.

Qualifications

• Senior IC with a track record of delivering critical production systems.
• Experience architecting large-scale distributed infrastructure.
• Strong Linux systems and kernel-level engineering background.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive architectural direction for infra platforms running millions of VMs monthly.
• Ensure production reliability, performance, and scalability as capacity expands.
• Translate product and business strategy into long-term technical roadmaps with founders.
• Design kernel- and filesystem-level systems, including eBPF and namespaces.
• Lead infra initiatives from problem definition to production delivery.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.

Skills

Distributed systems

Linux kernel engineering

Virtualization

Go/Rust/C

Performance optimization

Technical leadership

Architecture ownership

Tools

Firecracker

QEMU

Cloud Hypervisor

Ceph

eBPF

cgroups

Namespaces

Job description

Staff Systems Engineer — Distributed Infrastructure

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. You'll 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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What We're Looking For

• 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.

Technology Environment

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

Compensation

Base Salary: $280,000–$380,000
Equity: Competitive equity package

Location

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 Eligibility

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.

Hiring

The company is looking to hire 1–5 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.