Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems

Role overview A senior individual-contributor position focused on the architecture of streaming and consensus-critical distributed systems. The work spans the full lifecycle—from paper design and review defense to implementation alongside a small senior team—on platforms where failure modes carry outsized consequences. The role is based in New York with remote flexibility, and is structured for engineers who want to own technical direction end to end.

Responsibilities - Design and document distributed-system architectures for streaming and consensus-critical workloads. - Lead design reviews, defending trade-offs in front of senior peers and executive stakeholders. - Build and harden production systems with a small, senior engineering team. - Diagnose deep system failures, including partitions and consistency edge cases, and drive structural fixes that prevent recurrence. - Mentor engineers through written artifacts (design docs, postmortems, runbooks) that make complex systems legible to varied audiences.

Requirements - Approximately ten years of production experience building and operating distributed systems. - Hands-on debugging of live partition or consensus incidents, followed by lasting redesigns. - Fluency in at least two of: Rust, Go, JVM internals, PostgreSQL internals, or Kafka internals. - Demonstrated ability to write clearly about complex systems for both executive and onboarding audiences.

Benefits and work setup - Compensation benchmarked against current market levels and reviewed annually. - Remote work supported from any major hub city, with relocation assistance available. - Hardware and learning budgets usable without special approval. - Minimum six weeks of paid leave, with leadership visibly taking time off.