Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs
Distributed Systems Engineer jobs are open across cloud infrastructure, fintech, healthtech, and enterprise software, from new-grad to principal and staff engineer, with specializations in consensus protocols, fault-tolerant architectures, and large-scale data pipelines. Find a role that fits from the openings below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 44+ Distributed Systems Engineer jobs
Our Mission
Reflection’s mission is to build open superintelligence and make it accessible to all. We’re developing open weight models for individuals, agents, enterprises, and even nation states. Our team of AI researchers and company builders come from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Brain, Meta, Character.AI, Anthropic and beyond.
Vision
Build and operate a company-wide foundations platform that accelerates every team by providing reliable, scalable developer infrastructure, SRE capabilities, and high-throughput data ingestion tooling enabling Reflection to move faster as we scale.
What This Team Does
Build and operate the core shared services that power our research, training, and production environments. These systems form the foundational platform that multiple teams depend on for model development, deployment, and evaluation, unifying data, compute, and workflow management across the stack while enabling rapid experimentation and reliable production systems.
- Build and operate shared services that multiple teams rely on across research and production workflows.
- Define and uphold reliability targets through SLIs, SLOs, and healthy on-call practices.
- Maintain strong operational readiness with runbooks, incident playbooks, and capacity planning.
- Ensure correctness and performance under load, addressing consistency, tail latency, and failure modes.
- Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms that enable high-velocity experimentation and iteration.
- Reduce operational burden through better tooling, standardization, and platform patterns that scale across teams.
What You'll Work With
- Container Abstractions: Containers-as-a-Service, Kubernetes abstraction layers, container orchestration, reproducible environments, multi-tenant isolation.
- Distributed Systems Architecture: Sharding, replication, coordination services, high-concurrency systems, concurrency control.
- Service Development Stack: gRPC, Protobuf, Go, Rust, C++.
- Reliability & Performance: Idempotency, retries, backpressure, SLI/SLO design, tail latency optimization, service reliability engineering.
About You
- Strong software engineering background with experience shipping production-grade systems.
- Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms that handle large-scale data or compute.
- Comfortable navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for reliability and speed.
- Thrive in a high-agency, fast-paced startup environment; bias toward action and impact.
- Excited about zero to one challenges, building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
- Collaborative, clear communicator, and comfortable working across research and infra boundaries.
- Motivated by creating the software backbone for the world’s most capable open-weight AI systems.
What We Offer
We believe that to build superintelligence that is truly open, you need to start at the foundation. Joining Reflection means building from the ground up as part of a small talent-dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the frontier of open foundational models. We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.
- Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain the best talent globally.
- Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
- Life & family: Fully paid parental leave for all new parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys. Financial support for family planning.
- Benefits & balance: paid time off when you need it, relocation support, and more perks that optimize your time.
- Opportunities to connect with teammates: lunch and dinner are provided daily. We have regular off-sites and team celebrations.
Our Mission
Reflection’s mission is to build open superintelligence and make it accessible to all. We’re developing open weight models for individuals, agents, enterprises, and even nation states. Our team of AI researchers and company builders come from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Brain, Meta, Character.AI, Anthropic and beyond.
Vision
Build and operate a company-wide foundations platform that accelerates every team by providing reliable, scalable developer infrastructure, SRE capabilities, and high-throughput data ingestion tooling enabling Reflection to move faster as we scale.
What This Team Does
Build and operate the core shared services that power our research, training, and production environments. These systems form the foundational platform that multiple teams depend on for model development, deployment, and evaluation, unifying data, compute, and workflow management across the stack while enabling rapid experimentation and reliable production systems.
- Build and operate shared services that multiple teams rely on across research and production workflows.
- Define and uphold reliability targets through SLIs, SLOs, and healthy on-call practices.
- Maintain strong operational readiness with runbooks, incident playbooks, and capacity planning.
- Ensure correctness and performance under load, addressing consistency, tail latency, and failure modes.
- Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms that enable high-velocity experimentation and iteration.
- Reduce operational burden through better tooling, standardization, and platform patterns that scale across teams.
What You'll Work With
- Container Abstractions: Containers-as-a-Service, Kubernetes abstraction layers, container orchestration, reproducible environments, multi-tenant isolation.
- Distributed Systems Architecture: Sharding, replication, coordination services, high-concurrency systems, concurrency control.
- Service Development Stack: gRPC, Protobuf, Go, Rust, C++.
- Reliability & Performance: Idempotency, retries, backpressure, SLI/SLO design, tail latency optimization, service reliability engineering.
About You
- Strong software engineering background with experience shipping production-grade systems.
- Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms that handle large-scale data or compute.
- Comfortable navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for reliability and speed.
- Thrive in a high-agency, fast-paced startup environment; bias toward action and impact.
- Excited about zero to one challenges, building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
- Collaborative, clear communicator, and comfortable working across research and infra boundaries.
- Motivated by creating the software backbone for the world’s most capable open-weight AI systems.
What We Offer
We believe that to build superintelligence that is truly open, you need to start at the foundation. Joining Reflection means building from the ground up as part of a small talent-dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the frontier of open foundational models. We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.
- Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain the best talent globally.
- Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
- Life & family: Fully paid parental leave for all new parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys. Financial support for family planning.
- Benefits & balance: paid time off when you need it, relocation support, and more perks that optimize your time.
- Opportunities to connect with teammates: lunch and dinner are provided daily. We have regular off-sites and team celebrations.
See All 44+ Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs
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Find JobsDistributed Systems Engineer Job Market
A snapshot from current openings nationwide, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Netflix18
- Andritz5
- NVIDIA3
- Figma2
- Nuro2
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software32
- Media & Entertainment9
- Manufacturing4
- Electronics & Hardware3
- Construction & Real Estate2
What Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in distributed systems engineer jobs.
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or a related engineering field
- Production experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale
- Proficiency in Go, Java, C++, or Rust for systems-level programming
- Hands-on experience with consensus protocols such as Raft or Paxos
- Familiarity with distributed messaging platforms like Kafka or Pulsar
- Experience with containerized infrastructure using Kubernetes and cloud platforms
Tips for Your Distributed Systems Engineer Job Search
Tailor your resume to system scale
Distributed systems roles care about the scale you've operated at. Quantify the size of clusters you've managed, the throughput of pipelines you've built, or the latency targets you've hit. Generic backend experience won't stand out without those specifics.
Highlight CAP theorem trade-off decisions
Hiring teams want evidence you've reasoned through consistency versus availability trade-offs in real production systems. Describe a specific decision you made and why. That signals engineering judgment, not just familiarity with distributed concepts.
Filter openings by stack before applying
Distributed systems roles vary widely by technology. A Kafka-heavy data-platform role and a Raft-based storage systems role need different preparation. Match your strongest stack to the job description before you apply, not after.
Apply early to roles that fit
Migrate Mate lists distributed systems engineer openings from across the United States in one place, so you can find roles that match and apply directly to each listing.
Prepare for distributed systems design interviews
Expect at least one open-ended system design question focused on failure modes, replication, and partition handling. Practice designing systems like distributed locks, leader election, or geo-replicated stores out loud, not just on paper.
Negotiate equity by evaluating vesting cliffs
Offers for distributed systems roles at growth-stage companies often front-load equity. Ask for the vesting schedule, cliff date, and whether the company has a refresh policy before comparing total compensation across offers.
Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs: Frequently Asked Questions
How many distributed systems engineer jobs are remote?
About 30% of distributed systems engineer openings are fully remote or hybrid as of June 2026, reflecting strong demand for experienced engineers regardless of location. Sub-areas like distributed storage, consensus systems, and infrastructure platform engineering tend to skew most remote, while roles embedded in hardware-adjacent or low-latency trading environments more often require on-site presence.
How do you become a distributed systems engineer?
Start by building a strong foundation in operating systems, networking, and concurrent programming, then move into studying how distributed systems handle failures, replication, and consistency. Contribute to or build open-source distributed tools to develop practical experience. Progress from backend engineering roles that touch service-to-service communication, then take on larger-scope infrastructure projects that require you to reason about partition tolerance and fault recovery in production.
How do you get hired as a distributed systems engineer with little experience?
Focus on demonstrating systems thinking rather than just distributed systems credentials. Build and document a personal project that tackles a real distributed challenge, such as a replicated key-value store or a distributed job scheduler. Study how production systems at companies like Cockroach Labs or Confluent are designed, then speak to those patterns in interviews. Entry-level roles on infrastructure or platform teams are the most accessible starting point.
What does the distributed systems engineer interview process look like?
The process typically starts with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview covering fundamentals like consistency models and clock synchronization. On-site or virtual rounds usually include a distributed systems design session, one or two algorithm and concurrency coding problems, and a behavioral interview. Some companies add a take-home design document or architecture review, especially for senior and staff-level roles.
Where can I find and apply to distributed systems engineer jobs?
You can find and apply to distributed systems engineer jobs on Migrate Mate, which lists current openings from across the United States. Search the roles available, find the ones that match your background and target stack, and apply directly to each listing.
See All 44+ Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs
Jump back to the full list of openings and apply to any distributed systems engineer role that fits.
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