System Engineer

Stealth Startup; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup is seeking a Systems Engineer to build reliable, scalable infrastructure for our AI-native software engineering platform. You will work on distributed backend services, storage systems, networking, and performance optimization.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving low-level systems problems, optimizing performance, and building infrastructure that supports millions of code analysis operations.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of backend or systems engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
• Experience building distributed systems and microservices.
• Linux systems programming and networking fundamentals.
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred).
• Excellent system design and debugging skills.
• Proven ownership of production infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance distributed backend systems.
• Develop scalable APIs and services for AI-powered code intelligence.
• Optimize latency, concurrency, and resource utilization across production infrastructure.
• Build reliable storage and data processing pipelines for large code repositories.
• Improve observability through logging, monitoring, and performance diagnostics.
• Collaborate with ML Engineers to support model serving and inference infrastructure.
• Contribute to system architecture, reliability, and security best practices.

Skills

Distributed systems

Rust

Go

C++

Java

Linux

AWS

System design

Debugging

Production ownership

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

We are looking for a Systems Engineer to build reliable, scalable infrastructure for our AI-native software engineering platform. You'll work on distributed backend services, storage systems, networking, and performance optimization while collaborating closely with ML and Product Engineers to deliver production-ready AI experiences.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving low-level systems problems, optimizing performance, and building infrastructure that supports millions of code analysis operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance distributed backend systems.
• Develop scalable APIs and services for AI-powered code intelligence.
• Optimize latency, concurrency, and resource utilization across production infrastructure.
• Build reliable storage and data processing pipelines for large code repositories.
• Improve observability through logging, monitoring, and performance diagnostics.
• Collaborate with ML Engineers to support model serving and inference infrastructure.
• Contribute to system architecture, reliability, and security best practices.

Must-Have Skills

• 4+ years of backend or systems engineering experience
• Strong Rust, Go, C++, or Java
• Experience building distributed systems and microservices
• Linux systems programming and networking fundamentals
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred)
• Excellent system design and debugging skills
• Proven ownership of production infrastructure

Nice to Have

• Kubernetes, Docker, or container orchestration
• High-performance computing or concurrency optimization
• Experience supporting LLM or ML inference platforms

Ideal Candidate

We're looking for a hands-on engineer who enjoys building foundational infrastructure rather than product features. The strongest candidates have experience designing resilient distributed systems, optimizing backend performance, and taking complex technical projects from architecture to production.