Senior Systems Software Engineer

Zoo•Los Angeles, CA

48d•$145,000 - $195,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Zoo is building the next generation of hardware design tools redefining how hardware products are designed, developed, and built. Our platform combines a modern, cloud-native CAD environment with AI-powered engineering workflows, helping teams design, iterate, and manufacture products faster than ever before. We are headquartered in Los Angeles, CA with both a local and remote team. We were founded and incubated by Embedded Ventures in 2021. We’re looking for a Senior Systems Software Engineer who can take ownership of the reliability, automation, and evolution of our core systems. You’ll work across the stack, with a strong emphasis on backend, infrastructure, and system-level engineering, to strengthen the foundations that everything else runs on. This role is for someone who enjoys digging into complex systems, building the tooling and automation that keep them running smoothly, and stepping in anywhere (including the frontend) when something needs fixing.

Requirements

B.S. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Strong professional experience in systems, platform, or infrastructure engineering.
Proficiency in Rust with a solid understanding of systems-level programming.
Solid experience with databases (transactional & analytical) including schema design, performance tuning, migrations, and operational reliability.
Strong understanding of API design, data flows, and service integrations.
Hands-on experience with distributed systems or service-oriented architectures.
Comfort working with infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments.
Ability to work autonomously and make high-leverage technical decisions in a fast-moving environment.
A bias toward automation and building tools that remove friction.

Nice To Haves

Experience with frontend development (JavaScript/React) for occasional UI-level fixes.
Background with billing systems (Stripe) or CRM platforms.
Experience building internal tooling, permissions systems, or developer productivity infrastructure.
Familiarity with CAD-adjacent workflows or domain-specific data pipelines.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain core systems and services that support our platform’s reliability, performance, and scalability.
Build automation and tooling that reduce operational overhead, improve developer workflows, and enforce system-level consistency.
Develop integrations between our systems and external platforms (e.g., billing, CRM, authentication, analytics).
Improve observability, monitoring, and alerting across services to ensure strong operational visibility.
Architect and maintain infrastructure components (e.g., distributed services, data pipelines, deployment automation).
Contribute to security-focused systems work, such as permissions controls, access flows, and auditability.
Troubleshoot issues across services and layers, backend, infrastructure, and occasionally frontend, taking full ownership from diagnosis to resolution.
Jump into frontend code as needed to close the loop on system-level changes or fix issues that block broader system reliability.