What are the responsibilities and job description for the Junior Systems Engineer position at databento?
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).
Our recruiting data suggests that underrepresented applicants often downplay their skills. Even if your experience doesn’t exactly match the qualifications listed, we still want to hear from you. Please apply!