System Software Engineer

Cyrus Tech; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Cyrus Technology Inc. is seeking a Systems Software Engineer to join our on-site team in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will own the development of real-time system components, with emphasis on compute efficiency, latency reduction, and memory footprint minimization.

The role requires hands-on coding, system design, profiling, and benchmarking to build production-grade software. Leadership and strong ownership of architectural decisions are valued.

Qualifications

• Memory optimization and memory-efficient system design.
• Systems-level programming, preferably in C/C++.
• Designing and implementing complex system architectures with emphasis on performance, latency, and resource utilization.
• Technical ownership and leadership in research or product development.

Responsibilities

• Own the development of one or more components within an end-to-end real-time system.
• Perform profiling, benchmarking, and hands-on coding with a focus on compute efficiency.
• Design scalable architectures while minimizing latency and memory footprint.
• Explain architectural decisions, performance tradeoffs, bottlenecks, and optimizations implemented.

Job description

Cyrus Technology Inc. is the first fully agentic sensor-analytics platform, designed from the ground up with generative AI at its core. The platform transforms existing cameras and sensors into real-time intelligence that can see, remember, reason, and act proactively. By predicting and preventing failures and incidents before they occur, Cyrus helps organizations improve safety, reliability, and operational efficiency.

The role

This full-time, on-site System Software Engineer role is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will own the development of one or more components within an end-to-end real-time system. The work involves a lot of system design, profiling, benchmarking, and hands-on coding.

What is particularly important in this role is a strong focus on compute efficiency — minimizing latency, memory footprint — while ensuring the system remains customizable and highly accurate.

We are looking for a systems software engineer with strong hands-on experience designing and building high-performance, production-grade systems.

Core technical background

The ideal candidate should have strong experience in:

• Memory optimization and memory-efficient system design
• Systems-level programming, preferably in C/C++
• Designing and implementing complex system architectures where performance, latency, and resource utilization are critical

Experience we value

We are particularly interested in engineers who have demonstrated technical ownership and leadership in research or product development. Strong examples include:

• A PhD with a highly applied research and engineering focus, where the candidate designed and implemented real working systems
• Experience as a lead engineer or senior individual contributor responsible for system architecture or system design
• Leading the development of a technically challenging system from concept through implementation and evaluation
• Experience solving difficult performance bottlenecks involving latency, memory, concurrency, or resource constraints

Strong positive signals

Candidates with the following backgrounds are especially interesting:

• A functional open-source GitHub repository, particularly projects implemented in C or C++
• Evidence of building functioning real-time systems
• Projects where the candidate can clearly explain architectural decisions, performance tradeoffs, bottlenecks, and optimizations they personally implemented

The following backgrounds may indicate a weaker fit for this particular role:

• Primarily theoretical background
• Simulation-based coding or research background
• Focused mostly on prototypes and mathematical modeling
• Spending a long period in a large tech company within big teams
• Being primarily in a manager-type role