Distributed Systems Software Engineer Jobs in California

Backend Software Engineer – Distributed Systems - 1818

Location: San Francisco or Palo Alto, CA (Hybrid – 4 Days Onsite)
Job Type: Full-Time
Compensation: $170,000 – $250,000 Base Salary + Equity

About the Role

We're looking for a Backend Software Engineer with strong expertise in distributed systems to help build and scale the core platform powering a high-performance infrastructure product.

This role focuses on designing and maintaining highly reliable backend systems that operate at production scale. You'll solve challenging problems involving concurrency, resource allocation, distributed coordination, and system reliability while partnering closely with engineering teams across the organization.

If you're passionate about distributed systems, backend architecture, and building software that operates reliably under heavy load, we'd love to hear from you.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and evolve highly scalable distributed backend systems.

• Develop core orchestration services responsible for resource allocation and platform operations.

• Build backend services that efficiently manage reservations, scheduling, and capacity allocation.

• Improve system stability, fault tolerance, and operational reliability.

• Design solutions for concurrency, race conditions, asynchronous processing, and distributed coordination.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure seamless integration across platform services.

• Ship features end-to-end, including architecture, implementation, database migrations, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and deployment automation.

• Participate in on-call rotations and production incident response.

• Help improve operational tooling, automation, and engineering best practices.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of backend software engineering experience (5–8 years preferred).

• Strong experience building and maintaining production distributed systems at scale.

• Proven expertise handling concurrency, asynchronous processing, race conditions, and distributed architectures.

• Professional experience developing production systems in Python.

• Experience working at a high-growth startup or well-recognized technology company.

• Strong understanding of software architecture, scalability, and backend system design.

• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills.

Technical Qualifications

Candidates should have experience with many of the following technologies:

Programming

• Python

Infrastructure & Cloud

• Kubernetes

• Docker

• AWS

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

• Terraform

Databases & Operations

• PostgreSQL

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Monitoring and observability tools

• CI/CD pipelines

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building marketplace, auction, exchange, reservation, or billing systems.

• Experience designing distributed scheduling or resource allocation platforms.

• Strong systems design background.

• Full-stack engineering experience with a backend focus.

• Experience influencing technical architecture and engineering decisions.

What We're Looking For

The ideal candidate enjoys solving difficult distributed systems challenges and takes pride in building reliable, scalable backend infrastructure.

Successful candidates will demonstrate:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems and backend architecture.

• High ownership and accountability.

• Ability to work across multiple areas of the engineering stack.

• Excellent collaboration and communication skills.

• Curiosity, adaptability, and a desire to continuously improve complex systems.

• Experience operating and maintaining production software—not just building prototypes.

Candidates Unlikely to Be a Fit

The following backgrounds generally do not align with this opportunity:

• Engineers who have only built prototypes or MVPs without owning production systems.

• Candidates who specialize in a single technology area and are unwilling to work across the broader backend platform.

• Engineers with limited experience designing or operating distributed systems.

• Candidates with multiple job tenures under two years over the past five years.