Founding Distributed Systems Engineer

About the company

Stealth startup is building the data infrastructure layer for the AI era, backed by top early-stage venture capitalists and founded by an ex-NVIDIA engineer. Our first product is a data orchestration system optimized for AI workloads, especially training and inference. We’re seeing demand from AI startups and are hiring to expand the product and grow with our early customers.

About the role

As a founding distributed systems engineer, you will design and build the core of our next-generation data infrastructure product, purpose-built for AI workloads. You’ll work directly with the founder, own major architectural decisions, and shape both the technical and product roadmaps as we scale. This role is ideal for someone who loves hard distributed systems problems, wants technical ownership and growth opportunities, wants strong compensation, and is excited to help define the standards of a new AI infrastructure company. We’d love for you to be a part of our journey.

What you’ll do

• Design, implement, and operate distributed storage and data systems that power AI workloads.
• Deploy and manage our infrastructure across multiple clouds to achieve a unified, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient footprint.
• Profile and optimize the performance and cost of our distributed systems.
• Set and uphold high standards for observability, SLOs, and incident response; participate in an on-call rotation for our production environment.
• Work through ambiguity in customer requirements, rapidly iterate on product ideas, and help decide what we build next.
• Contribute to and help define our engineering culture, tooling, and best practices as one of the earliest technical hires.

What we’re looking for

• Experience designing and building distributed systems in production at scale.
• Expertise in Operating Systems, Networking, Distributed Systems, and Databases.
• Expertise in running services in cloud environments, including deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows and the data infrastructure they require.
• Proficiency in Golang, C++, Rust, or Python, with a track record of shipping high-quality systems code.
• Proficiency with Kubernetes, containers, and infrastructure as code tools.
• Excellent English communication skills with the ability to operate through changing requirements with a collaborative mindset.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced startup environment during the 0->1 stage.

Interview Process

We aim to run a focused, respectful process that gives you a clear picture of the work and the team.

• Intro call (30 minutes): mutual fit, your background, and what we’re building.
• Technical coding (60 minutes): programming-based problem solving in data structures and algorithms, databases, and operating systems.
• System design interview I (60 minutes): theoretically oriented distributed systems.
• System design interview II (60 minutes): practically oriented distributed systems.
• Culture fit interview (60 minutes): A casual in-person discussion in California with the founder.
• Offer discussion (30 minutes): compensation, responsibilities, and what success looks like in the first 12–18 months.

Compensation & location

• Base salary: 200–275K.
• Sign-on bonus: 10–50K.
• Equity: 1–3% ownership.
• Full benefits package.
• Remote within the continental United States; US citizens and permanent residents only. However, we are willing to sponsor the TN visa for Canadians.