Staff Engineer - Distributed Systems

Responsibilities:

• Own the architecture health of a billion-scale distributed system, its failure modes, capacity limits, consistency guarantees, and the interactions between 50+ deployments that no single team can see

• Approve critical-path designs. Changes that touch the system's core go through you, not as bureaucracy, but as the person accountable for the whole staying sound. When there's a disagreement, you make your case on merit

• Hunt gaps proactively, single points of failure, unbounded queues, missing idempotency, thundering herds, quiet data-loss windows, and drive the fixes before they become incidents

• Build the parts nobody else can. No sprint tickets. You prototype the risky architectural bets yourself, ship the remediation after serious incidents, and pair into the gnarliest cross-team bugs, roughly a quarter to a third of your time in code, all of it on the hardest problems

• Make resilience a property of the system, not a heroic act, degradation strategies, backpressure, isolation boundaries, capacity models that survive 10%+ month-over-month growth

• Raise the teams around you. Design reviews that teach, post-mortems that change architecture (not just add alerts), and patterns that 80+ engineers build on

• Set the standard for how AI-assisted engineering works safely on systems this critical, where a bad merge doesn't cost a demo, it costs real businesses their revenue

The terrain:

• Runtime: Node.js (TypeScript), Go, thousands of pods on GKE

• Messaging & async: GCP Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Redis

• Storage: MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch

• Scale: 21.5B automation actions/month, 2.6B messages/month, 28.5K req/s peaks, ~226B async events across the org