Systems Engineer at Navia Systems

About the Company:

Why do some students perform better than others? Which debtors will default? Will there be a chain reaction? Which patients will respond to a treatment, and what pathway is responsible?

Increasingly, we are dependent on interpreting diverse, voluminous data. We seek to make sense of them, identify their underlying causes and, where possible, make precise and accurate predictions about the future.

Unlike addition or subtraction, however, these questions do not have definitive answers. At best, we may think we have an answer, but remain uncertain about its validity. At worst, we are so uncertain that we do not think there is an answer. Either way, our ability to acknowledge and quantify our uncertainty will determine whether we can find true and useful answers and act on them effectively.

This is what Navia is about. We design probabilistic computers, a new class of hardware and software that embraces uncertainty to generate inferences. Unlike current computers, which are built for logical deduction and precise arithmetic with no room for ambiguity, our computers are built for guessing the meaning behind inherently ambiguous data. Our first product, Veritable, solves challenging data interpretation and prediction problems in human health, policy, marketing and finance.

Our founders are a band of MIT graduates who have been working together for years, and we are backed by Founders Fund. We are passionate about helping people — and machines — understand their world and make better decisions. We believe probabilistic computing has the potential to spread as widely as the microprocessor and are working to realize this promise.

The ideal candidate:

For you to apply for this position, you must have a B.S. or M.S., in Computer Science or equivalent. Without being too dogmatic about the tools you choose to do your job, we hope you’re excited about using, supporting, and improving technologies like these:

1. Fabric, Puppet, or Chef for systems configuration and automation.
2. CMake and GCC for building optimized versions of our software.
3. Python for gluing everything together.
4. Hadoop for heavy computation.
5. EC2 for summoning as many cores as we can handle.
6. CouchDB and nginx for storing and exposing our work to the world.
7. Ubuntu for a happy Linux platform with few headaches.

Job Description and responsibilities:

We are looking for a Systems Engineer to build and scale our nascent infrastructure and ensure we can deliver all of our products and services seamlessly over the cloud. While over time your role will change, you should be able to:

1. Automate anything from web server configuration to software builds.
2. Support our development and testing efforts, diagnosing everything from build errors to hardware failures.
3. Work comfortably in a modern Linux environment, packaging software and deploying it to the cloud.
4. Make and defend decisions about hardware purchases and infrastructure growth.

To learn more about us, our culture, and the nontechnical requirements for the job, take a look here.

To apply:

If this sounds like a good fit, shoot us an email at careers@naviasystems.com.