2+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services or systems software
Production experience in at least one of Rust, Go, or C/C++ -- and willingness to ramp on Rust as the primary language
Solid working knowledge of Linux -- processes, networking, systemd, basic kernel concepts
Comfortable with HTTP APIs, JSON, gRPC, and at least one of the common RPC/IPC patterns
Familiarity with at least one of IPMI, Redfish, BMC tooling, PXE/iPXE, or bare metal provisioning -- or strong systems fundamentals and clear interest in learning it
Comfortable reading vendor documentation, RFCs, and packet captures to figure out how something actually works
Strong written communication -- can write a clear design doc, PR description, or incident postmortem
Bonus: exposure to DPUs, SmartNICs, SR-IOV, IOMMU, or virtualization stacks (KVM/QEMU/libvirt)
Bonus: experience with BGP, VXLAN, or datacenter networking