Staff Engineer - Distributed Systems

This role focuses on the architecture and resilience of large-scale distributed systems operating under significant production load. You will look across services, queues, databases, infrastructure, and deployment patterns to identify systemic risks before they become incidents. The role begins with a high-throughput automation platform and expands across communication and emerging product systems. You will influence critical-path architecture while remaining hands-on, spending meaningful time prototyping solutions, resolving complex failures, and shipping remediation. You will help establish capacity models, consistency guarantees, isolation boundaries, and failure-handling strategies that can withstand continued growth. This is a high-ownership environment where technical rigor, proactive problem solving, and clear cross-team communication are central to the role.

• 10+ years of engineering experience with deep, hands-on ownership of large-scale distributed systems; experience operating hundreds of services, thousands of instances, or systems processing billions of events is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated experience carrying direct accountability for production systems through significant incidents, migrations, reliability challenges, and operational failures.
• Deep expertise in queueing and asynchronous architectures, including delivery semantics, ordering, backpressure, idempotency, and the practical limitations of exactly-once processing.
• Strong knowledge of multiple storage technologies across SQL and NoSQL environments, with the ability to reason about consistency models, indexing at scale, performance, and appropriate technology selection.
• Expert-level experience with Redis or comparable in-memory systems, including behavior under memory pressure, network partitions, failover scenarios, and other failure conditions.
• Strong production experience operating Kubernetes at scale, including resource limits, autoscaling, capacity planning, node failures, and workload behavior under infrastructure disruption.
• Fluent in Node.js and/or Go, with sufficient hands-on ability to prototype technical proposals and implement production fixes on critical paths.
• Exceptional technical communication skills, including the ability to produce design documents, architectural diagrams, and root-cause analyses that drive decisions across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong systems-thinking ability, with an instinct for evaluating tail behavior, failure modes, network partitions, capacity constraints, and high-load scenarios.
• Proven ability to influence engineering teams through technical depth, constructive disagreement, clear reasoning, and respect.
• Strong ownership, curiosity, judgment, and problem-solving skills, particularly when dealing with ambiguous or cross-functional technical challenges.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools effectively on complex systems is an advantage, particularly when balancing development speed with code quality, reliability, and operational safety.
• GCP-native experience with technologies such as Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, GKE, and Firestore is a strong advantage.
• Previous experience in a Staff, Principal, Architect, or comparable systems-focused engineering capacity is beneficial.
• Experience taking new systems from initial architecture through production while also hardening mature systems is a plus.