Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Distributed systems engineers are among the most consistently sponsored roles in U.S. tech. H-1B approval rates for software infrastructure roles run high, and many employers sponsor from day one. This page shows open roles that include visa sponsorship. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
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Get Access To All JobsINTRODUCTION
At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next.
ABOUT THE TEAM
Netflix’s Compute organization owns our internet-scale cloud footprint. We constantly innovate to increase fleet-wide agility, efficiency, and reliability of this infrastructure. We build, operate, and maintain Compute services so that Netflix developers can rely on foundational building blocks that enable a “set it and forget it” approach to achieving scalability and cost efficiency. Join us as we push the boundaries of performance and resilience, empowering developers to create groundbreaking applications on a reliable platform. In Managed Compute, we believe getting up and running in the cloud quickly should be the easiest step toward getting your service running in the cloud. To help our internal customers do this, we offer APIs and managed configurations on our compute platform that abstract away compute resource and scheduling complexity, scaling responsiveness, and multi-tenant fair sharing. We see the future as one where our customers can rely on industry-leading, scalable, right-sized, and optimized compute without the need to know anything about where or on what their workloads run.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are seeking a highly skilled and accomplished engineer with demonstrable experience in evolving large-scale infrastructure systems and managed services on that infrastructure. The ideal candidate will bring a combination of leading innovative solutions across functional teams and hands-on development experience in complex distributed systems, backend services, AWS/cloud, and Kubernetes.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL
- Work closely with Product and Customers to design experiences that anticipate customers' needs and make doing internet-scale computing easy.
- Design, develop, and operate high-leverage managed compute services, informing trade-offs between complexity and ease-of-use against Netflix-wide business priorities.
- Drive alignment with stakeholders and manage strategic partnerships.
- Mentor peer engineers in building, maintaining, and deploying complex features that have impact across Netflix.
- Drive operational excellence on the Managed Compute team, continuously improving incident response, on-call, and other operational practices.
- Maintain currency on industry trends for new architectures, features, and off-the-shelf services; make recommendations on incorporating industry trends.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- A proven track record of architecting and implementing customer-focused products (large-scale distributed systems) that define and modify infrastructure.
- Hands-on experience building, maintaining, and integrating with Kubernetes operators, and how to abstract away orchestration complexities.
- Experience optimizing fleet utilization, and executing locally and globally optimal fleet changes at scale.
- Excellent communication and relationship-building skills.
- Demonstrated ability to drive infrastructure changes at scale.
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to break down complex problems, identify root causes using data, and deliver clear, actionable solutions.
- High degree of ownership and accountability for execution, managing multiple priorities effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
- Possess a growth mindset and a continuous drive to learn, evaluate, and adapt to new and evolving technologies.
- Experience with Golang, Java, and/or Python.
- Passion for building for customer ease of use.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
You will be successful in this role if you:
- Shine when you have to balance complex customer, engineering, and other stakeholder needs, and are obsessed with optimizing for the customer whenever possible.
- Have the ability to define and self-manage cross-functional projects fueled by ambiguous questions.
- Lead thoughtful collaboration, take pride in your work, and enjoy taking full ownership of projects from conception to production.
- Have read about Netflix’s culture and think you would thrive here.
COMPENSATION
Generally, our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $388,000.00 - $619,000.00. This compensation range will vary based on location.
BENEFITS
Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs. Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off.
Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner. We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.
Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.
INTRODUCTION
At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next.
ABOUT THE TEAM
Netflix’s Compute organization owns our internet-scale cloud footprint. We constantly innovate to increase fleet-wide agility, efficiency, and reliability of this infrastructure. We build, operate, and maintain Compute services so that Netflix developers can rely on foundational building blocks that enable a “set it and forget it” approach to achieving scalability and cost efficiency. Join us as we push the boundaries of performance and resilience, empowering developers to create groundbreaking applications on a reliable platform. In Managed Compute, we believe getting up and running in the cloud quickly should be the easiest step toward getting your service running in the cloud. To help our internal customers do this, we offer APIs and managed configurations on our compute platform that abstract away compute resource and scheduling complexity, scaling responsiveness, and multi-tenant fair sharing. We see the future as one where our customers can rely on industry-leading, scalable, right-sized, and optimized compute without the need to know anything about where or on what their workloads run.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are seeking a highly skilled and accomplished engineer with demonstrable experience in evolving large-scale infrastructure systems and managed services on that infrastructure. The ideal candidate will bring a combination of leading innovative solutions across functional teams and hands-on development experience in complex distributed systems, backend services, AWS/cloud, and Kubernetes.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL
- Work closely with Product and Customers to design experiences that anticipate customers' needs and make doing internet-scale computing easy.
- Design, develop, and operate high-leverage managed compute services, informing trade-offs between complexity and ease-of-use against Netflix-wide business priorities.
- Drive alignment with stakeholders and manage strategic partnerships.
- Mentor peer engineers in building, maintaining, and deploying complex features that have impact across Netflix.
- Drive operational excellence on the Managed Compute team, continuously improving incident response, on-call, and other operational practices.
- Maintain currency on industry trends for new architectures, features, and off-the-shelf services; make recommendations on incorporating industry trends.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- A proven track record of architecting and implementing customer-focused products (large-scale distributed systems) that define and modify infrastructure.
- Hands-on experience building, maintaining, and integrating with Kubernetes operators, and how to abstract away orchestration complexities.
- Experience optimizing fleet utilization, and executing locally and globally optimal fleet changes at scale.
- Excellent communication and relationship-building skills.
- Demonstrated ability to drive infrastructure changes at scale.
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to break down complex problems, identify root causes using data, and deliver clear, actionable solutions.
- High degree of ownership and accountability for execution, managing multiple priorities effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
- Possess a growth mindset and a continuous drive to learn, evaluate, and adapt to new and evolving technologies.
- Experience with Golang, Java, and/or Python.
- Passion for building for customer ease of use.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
You will be successful in this role if you:
- Shine when you have to balance complex customer, engineering, and other stakeholder needs, and are obsessed with optimizing for the customer whenever possible.
- Have the ability to define and self-manage cross-functional projects fueled by ambiguous questions.
- Lead thoughtful collaboration, take pride in your work, and enjoy taking full ownership of projects from conception to production.
- Have read about Netflix’s culture and think you would thrive here.
COMPENSATION
Generally, our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $388,000.00 - $619,000.00. This compensation range will vary based on location.
BENEFITS
Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs. Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off.
Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner. We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.
Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.
How to Get Visa Sponsorship as a Distributed Systems Engineer
Target infrastructure-heavy engineering teams
Companies running large-scale distributed systems, think cloud platforms, fintech, and streaming services, sponsor the most consistently. These teams have ongoing headcount needs and established immigration pipelines, making sponsorship a standard part of hiring.
Lead with systems design depth in your resume
USCIS approves H-1B petitions for distributed systems roles based on specialty occupation criteria. Resumes that demonstrate theoretical depth, such as consensus algorithms, fault tolerance, or distributed transactions, strengthen the case that a bachelor's degree in CS is required.
Factor cap-exempt employers into your search
Universities, nonprofit research labs, and certain government-affiliated organizations are exempt from the H-1B lottery. Distributed systems roles exist at these institutions, and cap-exempt sponsorship means you can start immediately without waiting for the annual lottery cycle.
Understand that O-1A is a real alternative
If you've published research, spoken at systems conferences like OSDI or SOSP, or led widely adopted open-source infrastructure projects, you may qualify for an O-1A. This visa bypasses the lottery entirely and is increasingly viable for senior engineers.
Check LCA filings to verify sponsorship history
Employers file Labor Condition Applications publicly for every H-1B hire. Searching the Department of Labor's OFLC disclosure database by company name shows whether a prospective employer has actually sponsored engineers recently, not just claimed they do.
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Get Access To All JobsFrequently Asked Questions
Is distributed systems engineer a specialty occupation for H-1B purposes?
Yes. Distributed systems engineering consistently qualifies as a specialty occupation under H-1B rules because the role normally requires at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a closely related field. USCIS has approved thousands of H-1B petitions for this job title. Roles focused on consensus protocols, distributed storage, or large-scale reliability are particularly well-supported by the specialty occupation standard.
Do I need a computer science degree specifically, or will a related field work?
A degree in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, or software engineering all support an H-1B petition for this role. The key is that your degree field connects logically to distributed systems work. If your degree is in an unrelated field, three years of directly relevant professional experience can substitute for each year of missing education under USCIS equivalency rules.
Which types of employers sponsor distributed systems engineers most reliably?
Cloud infrastructure companies, large-scale fintech firms, streaming platforms, and database companies sponsor the most distributed systems engineers. These organizations run complex internal systems that require specialized expertise and have legal teams experienced with H-1B petitions. You can browse verified sponsoring employers on Migrate Mate, where all listed roles include visa sponsorship.
How does the H-1B lottery affect my chances if I have a master's degree in CS?
A U.S. master's degree in a qualifying STEM field enters you into the advanced degree exemption pool, which is drawn first. In recent fiscal years, the master's cap selection rate has been meaningfully higher than the regular cap rate. If you earned your master's outside the U.S., you compete in the general pool only, though the practical difference in selection odds has narrowed as overall registrations have grown.
Can I switch employers mid-H-1B if I find a better distributed systems role?
Yes. Under H-1B portability rules, you can start working for a new employer as soon as they file an H-1B transfer petition, without waiting for approval, provided your current H-1B was properly approved and you've maintained valid status. Your new employer files a fresh Form I-129 with an updated Labor Condition Application reflecting the new role and location.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Distributed Systems Engineer jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.
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