Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

Job Description

Title: Senior Distributed Systems Engineer
Location: Remote – United States
Department: Engineering
Classification: Exempt, Full Time

This role is responsible for designing and hardening distributed systems that operate reliably in imperfect conditions.

The Senior Distributed Systems Engineer builds and maintains loosely coupled, resilient systems that function across unreliable, high-latency, or low-bandwidth environments. Success is defined by systems that degrade gracefully, recover effectively, and continue operating when ideal conditions are unavailable.

This position ensures data flows reliably, services coordinate effectively, and distributed components behave predictably in variable network conditions.

Responsibilities

• Architect distributed systems that tolerate latency, bandwidth constraints, and intermittent connectivity
• Design loosely coupled services that reduce cross-system fragility
• Implement fault-tolerant communication and state synchronization strategies
• Develop systems that prioritize correctness, durability, and recovery
• Implement retry logic, backpressure, caching strategies, and eventual consistency patterns
• Ensure systems degrade gracefully instead of failing catastrophically
• Design and maintain APIs and communication layers between distributed components
• Identify and reduce tight coupling across services
• Diagnose and resolve cross-system failures in production environments
• Write efficient, production-grade code in Rust or Go
• Optimize performance and memory usage in resource-constrained environments
• Debug network behavior, concurrency issues, and distributed coordination challenges

Requirements

• Extensive experience building loosely coupled distributed systems
• Experience working in environments with low bandwidth, high latency, or unreliable communication links
• Knowledge of failure modes in distributed architectures and mitigation strategies
• Ability to reason about consistency models, coordination strategies, and state replication
• Experience writing production systems in Rust or Go
• Experience solving systems-level engineering challenges
• Focus on durability, reliability, and operational behavior

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with edge computing or constrained network environments
• Familiarity with message queues, event-driven systems, or streaming architectures
• Background in AI or HPC-related distributed systems
• Experience debugging production networking issues
• Exposure to consensus algorithms or distributed coordination primitives