Low-level craft and infra hiring still draws real interest
Wasmer (YC S19) is hiring OS and hypervisor experts in Europe (50300643). Elsewhere the front page rewards depth: Meta's move to AV1 for real-time video came up under 'H.264 Is Magic' (50291054), a call graph analyzer for finding panics (50273504), a Python smartwatch (50255573), and the Cuis Smalltalk system (50255343). Commenters on the IPv4 post (50287775) call the unfinished IPv6 move a failure of industry competence.
The pattern: while AI headlines dominate, the people who understand kernels, codecs, protocols and firmware are the ones startups like Wasmer and Simantic are building around. These skills are hard to replace with an agent, because the failures are physical or deep in the stack.
The hiring signal is thin, since it's one post and some adjacent curiosity, not a trend in numbers.
So what?
If you need systems talent, the pitch is hard problems, not perks, and Europe is where Wasmer is looking. If you have these skills, you're better positioned than most as agents take over routine app code.