Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in New York
Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in New York are among the most active in the country, concentrated in finance, cloud infrastructure, media technology, and enterprise software across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the broader metro area, with openings at every level from junior engineer to principal architect. Major employers with a deep and lasting presence in New York include Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Bloomberg, all of which maintain large distributed systems teams in the city. The most in-demand specialties are consensus protocols, distributed databases, and real-time data pipeline architecture. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 8+ 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 8 Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in New York
Find roles in New York that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find JobsDistributed Systems Engineer Jobs by City in New York
Where New York roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Distributed Systems Engineer Job Market in New York
A snapshot from current New York openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Netflix4
- Moment1
- Reflection1
- Reflection AI1
- tubi1
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software6
- Media & Entertainment2
- Construction & Real Estate1
What New York Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in distributed systems engineer jobs across New York.
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field
- Proficiency in distributed systems design including consensus algorithms and fault-tolerant architectures
- Hands-on experience with distributed data stores such as Cassandra, DynamoDB, or Apache Kafka
- Strong programming skills in Go, Java, or C++ for systems-level development
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure in production environments
- Familiarity with observability tooling including distributed tracing, metrics pipelines, and SLO management
Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in New York: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a distributed systems engineer in New York?
Distributed systems engineering in New York requires no state-issued license, so entry follows a technical education and experience path. Most roles require a bachelor's degree in computer science or a closely related field, and many New York employers in finance and cloud infrastructure prefer candidates with a master's. Building a portfolio of open-source systems work and earning cloud certifications from AWS or Google Cloud strengthens applications considerably in this market.
How much do distributed systems engineers make in New York?
Distributed systems engineers in New York earn a median of about $116,990 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $59,740 for the lowest 10% to over $203,040 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire distributed systems engineers in New York?
Employers hiring distributed systems engineers in New York right now include Netflix, Moment, and Reflection, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of June 2026. New York's concentration of large financial institutions and cloud-first media and technology companies means demand is broad and relatively consistent across both established enterprises and well-funded startups.
Which New York cities have the most distributed systems engineer jobs?
The cities with the most distributed systems engineer openings in New York are New York. Manhattan dominates due to its density of financial services firms, cloud computing offices, and media technology companies, while secondary hubs reflect the broader metro's expansion of engineering teams into Brooklyn and areas with large corporate campuses or university research partnerships.
Are there remote distributed systems engineer jobs in New York?
Yes, and more than most engineering fields. About 0% of distributed systems engineer openings tied to New York are remote or hybrid as of June 2026, reflecting how naturally the work lends itself to asynchronous collaboration. The parts of the role most amenable to full remote are architecture design, code review, and on-call incident response, while some New York financial employers require on-site presence for compliance reasons.
How can I get hired as a distributed systems engineer in New York with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is through a junior infrastructure or backend engineering role at a New York company that runs distributed systems internally, then transferring once you have production exposure. Large New York employers like Bloomberg and major banks run structured new-graduate engineering programs that rotate through distributed systems teams. Building open-source contributions to projects like etcd or Apache Flink, or completing a graduate degree at Columbia or NYU with a systems focus, gives candidates a clear edge when competing for first roles.
Where can I find and apply to distributed systems engineer jobs in New York?
You can find and apply to distributed systems engineer jobs in New York on Migrate Mate, which lists current New York openings updated regularly. Search the listings, find the roles that fit your experience and preferred location, and apply directly to the employers posting them.
See All 8 Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in New York
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