Staff Software Engineer, Runtime Systems

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential AI infrastructure organisation seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Runtime Systems to join their Physical AI Engineering team in London. In this hands-on systems engineering role, you will design and build the runtime layer that enables complex AI, simulation, robotics, and engineering workloads to execute reliably at scale.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Designing and building runtime components for complex AI and simulation workloads
• Defining abstractions for workloads, execution environments, dependencies, state, capabilities, and failure modes
• Designing interfaces between higher-level services and systems such as Kubernetes, Argo, and OSMO
• Establishing clear boundaries around which systems own state, decisions, and side effects
• Making architectural decisions balancing simplicity, extensibility, performance, and operational reality
• Defining durable contracts between workload definitions, control-plane services, and execution backends
• Developing typed representations and schemas that allow workloads to be transformed safely across systems
• Building conformance and validation mechanisms that make guarantees executable
• Writing production-quality software for critical runtime and control-plane components
• Building adapters and integrations for heterogeneous execution environments
• Diagnosing behaviour across application, orchestration, cluster, and infrastructure boundaries
• Improving the reliability, observability, and debuggability of distributed workload execution
• Developing rigorous approaches to understand workload performance across large-scale GPU infrastructure
• Designing experiments that separate real performance gains from noise and scheduling behaviour
• Leading ambiguous systems problems where the correct architecture is not yet known
• Reducing complex problems into smaller contracts and mechanisms that can be implemented
• Mentoring engineers and contributing to technical hiring and engineering standards

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Significant experience building complex systems software, distributed infrastructure, runtimes, workflow systems, or adjacent technology
• Deep expertise in at least one of: distributed systems, runtime systems, workflow or execution engines, programming languages/compilers/interpreters, cluster scheduling and orchestration, or high-performance systems software
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production coding ability
• Experience designing APIs, protocols, schemas, or contracts between independently evolving systems
• Strong understanding of distributed-system failure modes, state, authority, retries, concurrency, and side effects
• Strong technical judgement around when abstraction helps and when it simply moves complexity elsewhere
• Comfortable entering unfamiliar technical domains and building depth quickly
• Strong communication skills and experience influencing architectural decisions across teams

Valuable but not required experience:

• Go, Rust, C/C++, or Python
• Kubernetes and containerised infrastructure
• Argo, OSMO, Temporal, Ray, Kubeflow, or similar systems
• GPU clusters or large-scale AI infrastructure
• High-performance computing
• Simulation, robotics, autonomous systems, or Physical AI
• Programming language or compiler research
• Performance engineering
• Cloud infrastructure at scale

Qualities we value:

• Systems thinking: you ask where authority lives and what happens when systems fail
• Technical depth: you want to understand how systems really behave, not just how they're supposed to
• Pragmatism: you value elegant engineering but care more about whether it works for real workloads
• Evidence-driven approach: you test assumptions and change direction when evidence warrants
• Strong technical leadership: you can form views, challenge stakeholders, and bring others along
• Commercial awareness: you understand that technical decisions need to improve customer outcomes, engineering velocity, reliability, or economics
• Ownership mentality: you take responsibility for getting difficult systems into production

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team will review your application and conduct an initial screening call to understand your background and experience with runtime systems, distributed infrastructure, and large-scale workload execution. If there's a strong match, we'll submit your profile to our client for consideration.

The client will then conduct their own interview process, which typically includes technical discussions about systems architecture, distributed systems design, and hands-on problem-solving. Please do not contact the client directly—all communication and coordination will flow through Get A Job.ai to ensure the best candidate experience.

This is a staff-level position based in London, requiring significant experience with complex systems software and distributed infrastructure.

Pay

The original employer has indicated a base salary range of £116,000 to £155,000 for this position, determined based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location. The total rewards package also includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and comprehensive benefits (all based on eligibility).

Benefits include family-level medical and dental insurance, generous pension contribution, life assurance at 4x salary, critical illness cover, employee assistance programme, and tuition reimbursement.

Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse team and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.