I think there are plenty of companies building stuff like this, and hiring for it. The problem is going to be that the founding engineers have already hammered down (or attempted to) the bulk of the initial interesting engineering problems and what they want is foot soldiers to complete, fix, patch up, and maintain their design.
That's ok, because that's what the software engineering profession is, on the whole, for better or for worse.
But... the interview process should be clear about that, and the questions reflect that. Rather than "how would you build a high performance distributed database" the questions in those cases need to revolve around identifying problems in a design and how benchmarking, diagnostics, bug fixing, etc. would go. Even at the height of VC fever a couple years ago, being blessed with "Hey, here's some $$, go write a [database|operating system|game engine|programming language|other sexy thing]" doesn't happen really (and probably for good reasons.)
So, yeah, GP commenter is a bit disingenuous. There really are only a scant number of jobs which would involve actually being able to do these things, let alone answer how to do them in interview on demand. The jobs that are there are fixing someone else's thing where already they did this stuff.
Said interviewer would likely find a candidate who can answer all those questions... and then hire them to go write some microservices in C# for an insurance company, or join an on-call shift diagnosing production problems with an off the shelf database replication process or something.
Of course, not telling you what you don't already know, just ranting :-)
That's ok, because that's what the software engineering profession is, on the whole, for better or for worse.
But... the interview process should be clear about that, and the questions reflect that. Rather than "how would you build a high performance distributed database" the questions in those cases need to revolve around identifying problems in a design and how benchmarking, diagnostics, bug fixing, etc. would go. Even at the height of VC fever a couple years ago, being blessed with "Hey, here's some $$, go write a [database|operating system|game engine|programming language|other sexy thing]" doesn't happen really (and probably for good reasons.)
So, yeah, GP commenter is a bit disingenuous. There really are only a scant number of jobs which would involve actually being able to do these things, let alone answer how to do them in interview on demand. The jobs that are there are fixing someone else's thing where already they did this stuff.
Said interviewer would likely find a candidate who can answer all those questions... and then hire them to go write some microservices in C# for an insurance company, or join an on-call shift diagnosing production problems with an off the shelf database replication process or something.
Of course, not telling you what you don't already know, just ranting :-)