Ask HN: Are there less low-level systems jobs these days?

[stormbeard]

My favorite subjects in under/graduate school were things like operating systems, networking, filesystems, and databases. I rather enjoy worrying about memory/performance and my current skill set revolves around optimizing existing code. However, it seems to me that most of the new job postings that are "infrastructure" related seem to be writing wrappers around AWS/GCP/Azure services. Even within FAANG companies, it appears to me that the teams working on these systems are few and far between.

Where can the bulk of this type of work be found? Has the computing world solved most of these problems and moved on or am I not looking in the right places?

[janbernhart]

If you avoid e-commerce companies you're likely to still find these jobs. And as a matter of fact; these companies struggle more and more to hire people like you, because most of your peers rely on wrappers around AWS/GCP/Azure.

A lot of trading companies for instance will be looking for people like you. (In fact; i'm hiring people like you).

[zerohp]

You find these jobs through word of mouth and professional networking. There aren't a lot of people doing this work, and most of them know each other (with 1 or 2 degrees of separation.) It's hard to cold approach a company and get a low-level systems programming job.

[bitdeep]

Will be nice to have someone like you on my rekon platform to optimize our hardware acceleration engine.

[allwein]

I find that there's tons of embedded systems work out there, especially in the medical device space.