Systems Engineer

Systems Engineer (Performance / Runtime / Infrastructure) – NYC

Up to $300,000 + Equity | New York City

We’re working with a high-growth AI company based in New York that has reached $10M ARR within its first year and is now scaling its engineering team.

This is a systems-focused role working on the core execution layer of the platform. The team is building and improving the systems that determine how workloads are executed, scheduled, and optimised in production, with a strong focus on performance, latency, throughput, and reliability under real-world load.

A key part of the work involves running untrusted, AI-generated code safely at scale. This includes building sandboxed execution environments, working with containers and isolation mechanisms, and designing systems that can securely handle thousands of concurrent workloads.

Unlike typical infrastructure roles, this sits much closer to how systems actually behave under the hood. Engineers have direct control over system design, execution, and performance rather than primarily working with higher-level cloud abstractions.

What you’ll be doing

• Debugging and improving system performance (latency, throughput, efficiency)
• Identifying bottlenecks and optimising systems under real production load
• Building and improving runtime systems and execution environments
• Working on sandboxing, containers, and isolation for running untrusted code
• Designing systems that handle thousands of concurrent workloads
• Building orchestration systems for stateless containers
• Contributing to multi-tenant infrastructure and resource management
• Working on high-throughput, real-time systems

What they’re looking for

• Strong software engineering fundamentals (Go is used, but not required)
• Experience working on performance-critical or distributed systems
• Experience with containers and orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, container runtimes), with a focus on execution, performance, and systems behaviour
• Experience or interest in sandboxing, isolation, or execution environments
• Understanding of concurrency, multithreading, or networking fundamentals
• Comfortable debugging complex systems in production
• Experience with multi-tenant or high-throughput systems is a plus

This tends to suit engineers who enjoy working on systems, performance, and how things actually run under the hood, rather than focusing purely on application-layer features or infrastructure management.

The team is highly capable, and moves quickly, offering strong ownership and the opportunity to work on genuinely challenging systems problems.

If this sounds interesting, please apply!