Junior Systems Engineer

Databento is a startup that builds modern APIs to get financial data. As a Series A startup, we've raised $37.8M to date, and grown our revenues by over 958% Y/Y in the past year—all with a team of fewer than 30 employees.

We’re looking for a junior systems engineer (on parity with L3 to L4 at a large tech firm) to join our systems team. Our team manages the backbone of Databento’s platform — from Ceph storage and high-throughput networking to bare metal and containerized deployments across multiple data centers. You’ll work hands-on with a 25 GbE network stack, distributed storage exceeding 4 PB, and a modern hybrid environment spanning self-hosted and cloud systems.

We offer health, dental, disability, and life insurance benefits, as well as 401(k) matching for full-time employees. We accommodate 100% remote work, with teammates living around the globe and paid in their local currency.

Responsibilities

• Systems and network configuration.
• Bare-metal and containerized application deployment.
• Maintaining large storage clusters.
• Instrumenting performance measurement and alerts.
• Improving systems automation and tooling.
• On-call support.
• Coordinating bulk data delivery to customers and vendor partners.
• Occasional physical infrastructure deliveries and systems provisioning.

Required qualifications

• Strong Linux knowledge.
• Experience with systems configuration and provisioning (PXE, Puppet, and Ansible preferred; Terraform).
• Understanding of storage concepts (RAID, LVM, popular filesystems, distributed storage).
• Basic networking (OSI model, IP protocols, switching/routing).
• Ability to code in Python and write shell scripts.
• DevOps/GitOps mindset.
• Prior internship experience or 2+ years in full-time systems engineering or infrastructure roles.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S.; H-1B visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with distributed storage systems (e.g., Ceph).
• Customer support experience and strong problem-solving abilities.
• Prior experience at a trading or fintech firm, or a strong interest in learning fintech.
• Database administration (MySQL, ClickHouse, Redis).
• Cloud engineering basics (AWS, GCP — compute, storage).
• Virtualization and compute workloads (Proxmox, Docker, Kubernetes, HTCondor).
• Systems and network tuning.
• Monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Loki).
• Ability to travel to data centers in New Jersey or Boston on short notice (within one week).