Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in California

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.