Founding Engineer

About the role

The hardware platform is what makes Primitive possible. It's the system that turns physical machines — x86 servers, ARM SBCs, embedded targets behind a BMC — into a reliable, observable fleet that customers can trust to run real jobs.

We're hiring a founding engineer to own that system end-to-end: how machines get provisioned, how they check in, how we recover them when they wedge, and how we add support for new hardware classes without rewriting the world every time. You'll set the technical direction for the metal layer, partner with the full-stack and ML teams to expose it cleanly through the product, and shape what good looks like as we scale the fleet.

This is a founding IC role with real surface area. If you've wanted to own a hardware control plane from PXE up through the product API, this is that.

What you'll do

• Own and evolve the Rust controller — PXE/iPXE flows, IP→MAC resolution, network boot orchestration
• Design and operate out-of-band management: Redfish/IPMI integrations, power cycling, console capture, BMC firmware quirks
• Lead end-to-end hardware enablement projects: bring up new board classes from netboot to first green job, define what "supported" means for each
• Shape the hardware check-in protocol: agents reporting state over AMQP, lease/heartbeat semantics, failure detection and recovery
• Set scalability, reliability, and observability standards for the fleet — dashboards, alerting, runbooks
• Set the lab strategy: where Primitive's hardware lives and how labs operate as the fleet grows
• Partner across teams to surface fleet state cleanly through the GraphQL API and the product UI
• Mentor new engineers as the hardware team grows; raise the bar on code review and design quality
• Participate in the on-call rotation for fleet incidents — you'll be one of the people who knows how to fix it

About you

• 5+ years writing production systems software, ideally Rust, Go or Python
• Have shipped something that touched PXE/iPXE, BMCs, or netboot in production — not just in a lab
• Strong networking fundamentals: L2/L3, VLANs, DHCP/TFTP, and packet captures don't scare you
• Linux internals at the level of "I've debugged a stuck initramfs and won"
• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership: you've taken systems from design through production operation, not just feature delivery
• A bias for making physical systems observable — you don't trust anything you can't see on a dashboard
• Comfortable setting architectural direction across a small team, balancing vision with pragmatism

Bonus

• Built or operated a hardware lab at scale (CI farm, device cloud, test bench)
• Embedded experience: U-Boot, device trees, FPGA bring-up, JTAG
• Worked on or with OpenBMC, Redfish, or vendor BMC stacks
• Rust at scale in async / networked systems (Tokio, axum, tower)
• Contributed to open-source firmware, bootloader, or BMC projects

Stack

Rust, Python, Linux, PXE/iPXE, Redfish/IPMI, AMQP, PostgreSQL, AWS, Kubernetes.

How we work

• Offices in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA — flexible in-office attendance, no fixed days per week
• We like working together in person: regular team meetups across both offices
• Small team, high ownership — most engineers ship to production in their first week
• On-call rotation for the fleet, shared across the hardware team

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision for you and your dependents
• Substantial equity, with early exercise and an extended post-termination exercise window
• Unlimited paid vacation, plus local holidays
• Lab access included
• Equinox membership

Compensation

Base salary: $180,000 – $250,000, adjusted based on location, level, and experience. Total compensation includes substantial equity and the benefits above.

A note on applying

If you don't tick every box on the list above, apply anyway. The bullets describe the engineer we'd be thrilled to hire; what we actually need is someone who can do the work and learn the rest. We especially encourage applications from people who don't see themselves represented in tech today.