Strong experience with low-level languages (C/C++/Rust preferred) Experience with low-level OS interfaces (file I/O, synchronization, memory mapping) Ability to reason about memory (stack vs heap, allocation costs, fragmentation, paging behavior) Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (consistency, replication, durability, fault tolerance) Experience with binary formats and on-disk data layout Strong interest in database internals (storage engines, indexing, logging, MVCC, etc.) Comfortable with TDD and high-quality engineering practices Experienced with agentic coding and context engineering Strong problem-solving ability and deep system-level reasoning