System Software Engineer, Distributed Systems - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$152,000 - $287,500 USD yearly
Originally posted 6 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves designing, building, and delivering core components of productivity platforms for chip design engineers. The work focuses on developing userspace software for managing state, concurrency, and reliability at scale in distributed systems on bare-metal Linux hosts.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and deliver core components of productivity platforms.
- Develop reliable userspace infrastructure for long-running engineering workflows on bare-metal Linux hosts.
- Build state coordination over NFS, ensuring atomicity, idempotency/dedup, and partial-write recovery.
- Improve orchestration around IBM LSF, covering submission/tracking, retries/cancel, log capture, fairness/backpressure.
- Convert legacy codebases into modern forms using incremental migration techniques like Perl to Go, with stage gates and observability.
- Debug and improve performance and reliability across Linux, including operational tooling.
What you'll need
- B.S. CS/EE (or equivalent experience).
- 5+ years developing and operating production software in Go and/or Python in large codebases.
- Strong Linux fundamentals: processes, filesystems, permissions, synchronization/locks, concurrency, and debugging.
- Solid distributed-systems thinking: failures, retries/timeouts, backoff, idempotency, and operational rigor.
- Experience building long-runtime automation or services on shared compute clusters (batch schedulers, build systems).
- Ability to translate high-level goals into a safe delivery plan (instrumentation, staged rollout, measurable outcomes).
Skills: VLSI Productivity and Infrastructure, userspace software, bare-metal Linux hosts, distributed systems, build automation
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 50-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
912
|
Median days open
50 d
|
Median salary
$227k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (912 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 261 | 912 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 981 | 6043 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 44 d | 50 d (−6 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $227k |
Skills observed across this category: VLSI Productivity and Infrastructure, userspace software, bare-metal Linux hosts, distributed systems, build automation
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 258 open roles · median 45 d
- Qualcomm · 58 open roles · median 59 d
- AMD · 51 open roles · median 26 d
- Cerebras · 40 open roles · median 72 d
- Graphcore · 38 open roles · median 99 d
- Renesas Electronics · 32 open roles · median 44 d
How we counted: 912 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 86 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 7 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.