Founding Systems Engineer

Founding Systems Engineer

Remote Across the U.S. | San Francisco HQ Optional

About the Company

Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed infrastructure startup building foundational tooling for the next generation of AI-native software development. Their platform is rethinking how developers and AI agents collaborate on code, workflows, and large-scale knowledge systems.

Led by repeat founders with deep experience across developer tooling and distributed infrastructure, the company is backed by top-tier technical investors and is already seeing strong traction from engineering teams and AI-forward organizations.

This is an opportunity to join extremely early and help shape the technical foundation of a category-defining product.

The Opportunity

We’re hiring a Founding Systems Engineer to help build core infrastructure powering distributed developer systems at scale. This role is highly hands-on and ideal for engineers who thrive in low-level systems work, distributed architectures, and performance-critical environments.

You’ll work directly on foundational platform components including:

• Distributed systems infrastructure
• Version control and storage systems
• Virtual/distributed filesystem architecture
• Runtime and build infrastructure
• Performance optimization and concurrency
• Developer tooling and observability systems

This is a high-ownership engineering role where you’ll influence architecture, product direction, and technical strategy from the ground up.

What You’ll Bring

We’re looking for engineers who are deeply technical, highly autonomous, and excited by ambitious infrastructure problems. Strong candidates will likely have experience in areas such as:

• Distributed systems and backend infrastructure
• Systems programming in Rust, C++, or similar languages
• Storage systems, databases, or filesystem internals
• High-performance or low-latency systems
• Concurrency, networking, or runtime infrastructure
• Developer platforms, tooling, or build systems

Additional experience that would stand out includes:

• Open-source contributions
• Git internals or version control systems
• FUSE/filesystem experience
• Infrastructure platforms at scale
• Strong CS fundamentals and systems design depth

Ideal Profile

You may be a strong fit if you:

• Care deeply about engineering craftsmanship and product quality
• Enjoy solving technically difficult infrastructure problems
• Prefer ownership and autonomy over rigid process
• Are motivated by building foundational technology from scratch
• Thrive in fast-moving startup environments
• Want to work alongside highly technical builders

Tech Stack

Current technologies include:

• Rust
• TypeScript
• Bazel
• Pulumi

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary ranging from $200,000–$450,000 USD
• Meaningful founding-level equity package (approximately 0.2%–1%+ equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Flexible remote-first work environment across the U.S.
• Opportunity to work directly with highly technical founders and investors on deeply ambitious infrastructure problems

Location

This role is fully remote across the United States. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and team members occasionally meet onsite for collaboration sessions and team gatherings.