Foundational systems software

We make the compute you've already paid for do more.

Asterope is building foundational performance and efficiency software for the way modern hardware actually runs. We're early, we're quiet, and we're working with a small number of partners.

What we believe

The next gains come from using what's deployed — not deploying more.

01

You can't build your way out

Power, compute and memory are all scarce and getting more expensive, with multi-year lead times. Adding more capacity isn't a near-term option — so the pressing question is how much useful work the hardware already on the floor can deliver.

02

Software is the lever

The biggest near-term efficiency wins live in how software meets the machine — not in waiting years for more capacity to come online.

03

Built for many kinds of silicon

Modern infrastructure is no longer one kind of processor. We design for a world where workloads span very different hardware.

Founders

Founders who've gone from zero to scale.

Co-founder

George Neville-Neil

Co-author of The Design & Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System and the long-running "Kode Vicious" columnist for ACM Queue / CACM. Two decades of authority in low-level systems and performance.

FreeBSD Foundation board member and former Core Team. PhD candidate at Yale (systems & databases); Industrial Visitor at the University of Cambridge. Has built trading systems at Hudson River Trading and shipped code on NASA missions.

Co-founder

Prithvi Rai

Repeat founder with a completed exit — founder & CEO of Borneo, a data-security platform acquired by Atlassian in 2025.

Two decades of senior engineering leadership at Uber, Meta and Yahoo, building infrastructure and data platforms at hyperscaler scale. Delivered engineering and security for the Facebook and Uber IPOs. Board member, HTX (Singapore).

Careers

Build foundational systems software — from the ground up.

We're a small founding team of compiler, systems and hardware people. Every seat owns a real surface from day one. If you work close to the metal and want to build something durable, we'd like to talk.

How we work

Real ownership

Small team, real scope. Every person owns a surface end to end — not a queue of tickets someone else defined.

How we work

Depth over breadth

We go deep where it counts. We want systems people who care how the machine actually behaves, not just how the framework wraps it.

How we work

Disagree well

Strong opinions, low ego. We hire on merit and argue our way to the right answer — then commit to it together.

Open roles
Founding leadership

Head of Engineering

Turn deep research into shipped product — and strong individuals into a team.

Co-founder trackTeam building

This seat owns how we ship — build, delivery and quality — and, just as much, hiring and growing the team that does it.

What you'll own

  • Engineering delivery end to end: roadmap, quality, release.
  • Hiring and leading the founding engineers, and the standard for correctness and measurement.
  • Being the technical peer who can push back on anyone — founders included.

What we're looking for

  • Principal-level in compilers or systems, with both shipping and management behind you.
  • A player-coach who still reads the code.
  • You've shipped systems that ran in real production, not just prototypes — and built the small, senior, high-trust teams that did it.
Apply →
Senior IC

Staff / Sr. Principal Engineer

Set technical direction on our hardest systems and performance problems.

SystemsPerformanceAccelerators

A senior individual-contributor seat for someone who wants to shape the hardest parts of the system, hands-on, and pull the technical bar up around them.

What you'll own

  • Technical direction on the deepest systems and performance problems, across CPU and accelerators.
  • The experiments that de-risk our hardest bets and turn them into shipped, production-grade capability.
  • The bar for how we measure and reason about performance.

What we're looking for

  • A recognized systems or performance engineer — deep in compilers, kernels, or accelerator systems.
  • You've made real production systems faster and can prove it — at scale, not on a bench.
  • Deep enough to set direction; the kind of engineer other strong engineers want to work with.

Bonus points for

  • Cross-domain range — you've gone deep in more than one of compilers, runtime, GPU/accelerators, or distributed systems.
  • Experience operating what you build in large production environments.
  • Rust — you'll be working in and around a framework we've already built in it.
Apply →
Founding engineering

Compiler & Runtime

Own the compiler and runtime core — code generation that meets the machine it runs on.

LLVM / MLIRRuntimeCodegen

The core of the product finds a better-compiled version of a function for the hardware in front of us — and does it while the program runs. You own that engine: the compiler, the runtime, and the tooling that keeps it fast and correct.

What you'll own

  • The compiler and runtime pipeline end to end, from IR to native code that ships into live systems.
  • Correct, reproducible code generation across targets (x86, ARM, RISC-V).
  • Deep LLVM work — passes, codegen, and the tooling around them — proven on real workloads, not microbenchmarks.

What we're looking for

  • Real depth in compilers and LLVM / LLVM IR.
  • Strong C/C++; at home in the guts of optimization passes and codegen.
  • A bias for measurement — you prove a pass helps on production code, you don't assume it.
  • You've shipped compiler or runtime work that ran in production, not just in a paper.

Bonus points for

  • MLIR, and familiarity with ML-compiler stacks (XLA, TVM, Triton).
  • Runtime internals: dispatching work to kernels, launch APIs, memory allocators, JIT.
  • Comfortable profiling and debugging hot, performance-sensitive code at scale.
  • Rust — you'll be working in and around a framework we've already built in it.
  • FORTRAN (the math still lives there); experience shipping a toolchain others depend on.
Apply →
Founding engineering

Systems & Performance

Own how we see the machine, how we act on it — and how it stays reliable across a fleet.

PerformanceSchedulersFleet-scale

We drive software with live signals from the hardware — and it has to hold up across large production fleets, not one box on a bench. You build the layer that reads those signals, acts on them safely, and keeps them reliable at scale.

What you'll own

  • Low-overhead performance instrumentation from hardware, running in production.
  • Scheduling and placement of work across a mix of processors and many machines.
  • Correctness, safety and reliability of changes made to live, multi-node systems — rollout, observability, recovery.

What we're looking for

  • Depth in performance engineering and systems.
  • Hands-on with perf tooling (perf, VTune, PMCs) and OS internals / schedulers.
  • You've operated multi-node systems in production at fleet scale — not just benchmarked one.
  • You've made real systems measurably faster and kept them reliable.

Bonus points for

  • Distributed-systems depth: concurrency, fault tolerance, RPC, control planes.
  • Real experience with cluster schedulers and Kubernetes (beyond basic use); provisioning, quotas, observability.
  • High-speed networking (RDMA), drivers/firmware, or HPC.
  • Linux / FreeBSD kernel work, tracing, or production reliability (SRE) at scale.
  • Go, C++ or Python for systems work.
Apply →
Founding engineering

Accelerators

Take our work onto GPUs and FPGAs — multi-target, not just one vendor.

GPU kernelsFPGAMulti-vendor

A modern box has more than a CPU, and the interesting work is making the system use the right silicon well — live, across a range of accelerators, not one vendor's stack.

What you'll own

  • Accelerator kernels across multiple targets — broad, not single-vendor.
  • Getting real work onto GPUs and FPGAs and making it fast in production.
  • The accelerator side of the runtime, close to the metal.

What we're looking for

  • Real depth in GPU programming and/or FPGA / HDL.
  • Comfortable at the level of kernels, machine code, and what the hardware is actually doing.
  • Multi-target instincts: you think in capabilities, not one vendor's SDK.
  • You've shipped accelerator work that ran in production, not just demos.

Bonus points for

  • Fluency with accelerator programming models (ROCm, CUDA, Triton, CUTLASS) and how GPUs actually execute — warps and wavefronts, thread blocks, grids.
  • Memory and throughput tuning — coalesced access, shared-memory and cache use, occupancy, latency hiding, ILP.
  • Nsight (or equivalent) profiling; experience spanning several GPUs and distributed execution.
  • FPGA: HLS or Verilog; tensor-core or systolic-array experience. We'd love one GPU-leaning and one FPGA-leaning hire.
Apply →
Founding engineering

Inference Systems

Turn systems wins into end-to-end results on real inference workloads.

Serving systemsInference perf

Efficiency only matters if it shows up on real serving traffic. You connect low-level systems work to end-to-end inference results on production serving stacks.

What you'll own

  • Understanding how real inference workloads behave on modern serving stacks, at scale.
  • The experiments that turn systems-level work into a reproducible end-to-end result.
  • The work that makes our design-partner pilots succeed in production.

What we're looking for

  • Depth in ML systems / inference performance.
  • Hands-on with modern serving frameworks and GPU inference in production.
  • You can connect a low-level change to an end-to-end serving result — and you've done it on live traffic.

Bonus points for

  • Inference runtimes: vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or custom serving.
  • A working grasp of today's model architectures and how attention is implemented.
  • Serving internals — how requests get batched, scheduled and run concurrently, and how the KV cache is managed and laid out in memory.
  • Quantization; tuning systems where latency and throughput both matter; benchmarking at scale.
  • Python and C++.
Apply →
Founding engineering

Forward-Deployed

Land the result inside the customer's environment — half engineer, half closer.

Design partnersProduction

Pilots succeed or fail on the ground, inside someone else's production. You embed, integrate, and make the result real and reproducible on their fleet.

What you'll own

  • Embedding with the teams that run large compute fleets to stand up and run pilots.
  • Turning a research system into a deployment that survives someone else's production.
  • The feedback loop from the field back into the product.

What we're looking for

  • Spanning systems engineering and customer-facing delivery.
  • Credible with senior infra engineers; calm in someone else's production.
  • You've stood things up in large production environments — and you like shipping a result more than owning a codebase.

Bonus points for

  • Performance / observability background; prior FDE, FAE, or solutions-engineering at an infrastructure company.
  • Comfortable operating a fleet: Linux, Kubernetes, networking, incident response.
Apply →
Operations

Chief of Staff

Give the founders leverage through fundraising and the first pilots.

OperatingFundraising

A small team moving fast needs one person who makes everything else run.

What you'll own

  • Operating cadence, fundraising support, partner and investor logistics.
  • The connective tissue across engineering, partners and the founders.
  • Whatever is most important and least owned that week.

What we're looking for

  • A high-ownership operating, strategy, or founder-adjacent background.
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and direct with principals.

Bonus points for

  • Prior zero-to-one startup experience; technical literacy.
Apply →

Don't see your exact seat? If you're a compiler, systems or hardware person who wants real scope early, reach out anyway — careers@asterope.ai.

We're building quietly. If this is your world, let's talk.

We'd like to hear from teams that run large compute fleets, people who optimize infrastructure for a living, and engineers who want to build foundational systems software from the ground up.

hello@asterope.ai →
Partnerships & early access · hello@asterope.ai  ·  Founding-team roles · careers@asterope.ai