Staff Systems Engineer – AI Agent Runtime Lead (Cloud)

Sage Recruiting Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Sage Recruiting Inc. is helping a client hire a senior engineer to build the data layer where AI agents run production workloads. You’ll own the Runner, the cloud compute layer, using Python as the main language with Rust backing.

This is a hands-on tech-lead role with no management track by design. You’ll design scalable systems, APIs, and runtime components, and guide modernization while mentoring teammates.

Qualifications

• 7+ years designing, building, and operating distributed systems.
• Fluent in Python plus a low-level language; real Rust experience is a strong plus.
• Hands‑on experience building and running cloud infrastructure.
• Modern engineering practice: Git, containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, testing, observability.

Responsibilities

• Own the Runner layer that executes compute at scale in the cloud.
• Develop APIs and abstractions simple for humans, solid for agents to call.
• Performant execution of Rust, Python, and SQL workloads over object storage.
• Lead technical discussions and mentor junior team members.

Skills

Python

Rust

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Mentoring

Tools

Kubernetes

Spark

Query engines

APIs

Job description

Sage Recruiting Inc. is helping a client hire a senior engineer to build the data layer where AI agents run production workloads. You’ll own the Runner, the cloud compute layer, using Python as the main language with Rust backing.

This is a hands-on tech-lead role with no management track by design. You’ll design scalable systems, APIs, and runtime components, and guide modernization while mentoring teammates.