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Senior Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in California

Yield Engineering Systems

Sr. Systems Engineer

Fremont, CA · On-site

$114K - $156K/yr

Job Title: Sr. Systems Engineer Location: Fremont, California Responsibilities include but are not ... Design and validate power distribution systems * Set up test and data collection systems for design ...

Alphatec Spine

Senior Systems Engineer

Carlsbad, CA

$108K - $148K/yr

The Senior Systems Engineer will lead system design, integration, and software-centric product ... This role emphasizes cloud connected systems, requiring a strong understanding of distributed ...

Alphatec Spine

Senior Systems Engineer

Carlsbad, CA · On-site

$108K - $148K/yr

The Senior Systems Engineer will lead system design, integration, and software-centric product ... This role emphasizes cloud connected systems, requiring a strong understanding of distributed ...

Alphatec Spine

Senior Systems Engineer

Carlsbad, CA · On-site

$108K - $148K/yr

The Senior Systems Engineer will lead system design, integration, and software-centric product ... This role emphasizes cloud connected systems, requiring a strong understanding of distributed ...

Unto Labs

Systems Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$180K - $250K/yr

About Unto Labs Unto Labs is a team of low-level engineers pushing distributed systems to the physical limits of modern hardware. We're reimagining blockchains, from core consensus primitives to ...

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Senior Distributed Systems Engineer information

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$55.3K

$123.1K

$173.7K

How much do senior distributed systems engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Jul 15, 2026, the average yearly pay for senior distributed systems engineer in California is $123,099.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $103,100.00 and $141,100.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is the difference between Senior Distributed Systems Engineer vs Cloud Solutions Architect?

AspectSenior Distributed Systems EngineerCloud Solutions Architect
CredentialsBachelor's/Master's in CS or related, experience with distributed systemsBachelor's/Master's in CS, IT, or related, cloud certifications (AWS, Azure)
Work EnvironmentDesigning, developing, and maintaining distributed systems in tech companiesDesigning cloud infrastructure solutions for clients or internal teams
Industry UsageTech, finance, e-commerce, and enterprise sectorsIT consulting, cloud service providers, enterprise IT departments

The Senior Distributed Systems Engineer focuses on building and optimizing distributed computing systems, while the Cloud Solutions Architect designs cloud infrastructure solutions. Both roles require technical expertise and often overlap in cloud environments, but their primary responsibilities differ in scope and focus.

What engineer makes $500,000 a year?

Senior Distributed Systems Engineers can earn $500,000 or more annually, especially with extensive experience, specialized skills in cloud infrastructure, and leadership roles. Compensation often includes base salary, bonuses, and stock options in large tech companies or startups with high growth potential.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer, and why are they important?

A Senior Distributed Systems Engineer requires deep expertise in computer science fundamentals, scalable system architecture, and proficiency in programming languages such as Java, Go, or Python, often supported by a relevant degree and significant experience in distributed systems. Familiarity with tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) is typically expected, along with knowledge of monitoring and CI/CD pipelines. Strong problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills help in tackling complex engineering challenges and collaborating across teams. These skills are crucial for designing robust, scalable, and reliable systems that support organizational growth and high availability.

What engineers make $200,000 a year?

Senior distributed systems engineers often earn $200,000 or more annually, especially with extensive experience, advanced skills in cloud computing, and expertise in scalable architecture. Compensation can vary based on industry, location, and company size, with some roles in tech giants or specialized fields reaching or exceeding this level.

What are some common challenges Senior Distributed Systems Engineers face when designing scalable systems?

Senior Distributed Systems Engineers often encounter challenges such as managing data consistency, ensuring fault tolerance, and minimizing latency across multiple nodes. Balancing trade-offs between availability and partition tolerance (as outlined by the CAP theorem) is a frequent consideration. Additionally, coordinating between development and operations teams to maintain system reliability and efficiently resolve issues that arise in production environments is crucial. Strong communication skills and a deep understanding of distributed architectures help address these complexities effectively.

What are Senior Distributed Systems Engineers?

Senior Distributed Systems Engineers are experienced professionals who design, build, and maintain large-scale computing systems that run across multiple machines or locations. They focus on ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance of distributed applications, often dealing with challenges like data consistency, fault tolerance, and network latency. These engineers typically have deep expertise in distributed computing principles, programming languages, and cloud infrastructure. They also mentor junior team members and help architect robust solutions for complex technical problems.

What engineers make $300,000 a year?

Senior distributed systems engineers, software engineers in specialized fields like cloud infrastructure, and senior engineers with extensive experience and advanced skills can earn $300,000 or more annually. High compensation often depends on expertise in areas such as distributed architecture, performance optimization, and familiarity with tools like Kubernetes and cloud platforms, along with relevant certifications and a strong track record of project delivery.

Is L5 at Google Senior?

L5 at Google typically corresponds to a senior-level engineering role, often called Software Engineer II or equivalent, with significant experience and technical expertise. It is considered a mid-to-senior level position, with responsibilities including project leadership and mentorship. Advancement to higher levels generally requires demonstrated impact and leadership in projects.
What are the most commonly searched types of Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in California? The most popular types of Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in California are:
What are popular job titles related to Senior Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in California? For Senior Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:
What job categories do people searching Senior Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in California look for? The top searched job categories for Senior Distributed Systems Engineer jobs in California are:
What cities in California are hiring for Senior Distributed Systems Engineer jobs? Cities in California with the most Senior Distributed Systems Engineer job openings:
Senior Distributed Systems Engineer jobs near you
Infographic showing various Senior Distributed Systems Engineer job openings in California as of July 2026, with employment types broken down into 93% Full Time, 4% Part Time, 1% Temporary, and 2% Contract. Highlights an 92% Physical, 1% Hybrid, and 7% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $123,099 per year, or $59.2 per hour.
Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ad Eventing

Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ad Eventing

Netflix

Los Gatos, CA • On-site

Full-time

Medical, Life, Retirement, PTO

Re-posted 11 days ago

Netflix rating

5.8

Company rating: 5.8 out of 10

Based on 15 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

58th of 67 rated media

Job description

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.
We launched our ad-supported tier in November 2022 and are building a world-class, in-house ad tech ecosystem. Ad Eventing is the backbone of that ecosystem - the high-throughput, low-latency pipeline that captures, validates, deduplicates, and processes every ad impression, click, and completion event at Netflix scale. The accuracy and reliability of this data directly powers billing, reporting, pacing, and optimization across the entire ads platform.
Our Team
The Ad Eventing team sits within the Ad Serving & Decisioning org at Netflix Ads. We own the systems that ingest and process billions of ad events per day - from client-side beacons fired during playback to server-side signals from our ad server. Our work spans real-time event ingestion, deduplication and validation, stream processing pipelines, and the authoritative data contracts that downstream systems (billing, reporting, pacing, ML) depend on. We operate at the intersection of reliability engineering, data infrastructure, and ads domain expertise.
We are looking for a senior technical leader to own the technical direction of this pod, set the architectural bar, and drive execution on the hardest problems in event processing at Netflix scale. This is a 60% builder / 40% influencer role: you will write code, ship a proof-of-concept in your first weeks, and earn the trust of an opinionated senior team while simultaneously setting direction across the organization.
What You'll Do
  • Own the technical direction of the Ad Eventing team: architecture reviews, incident leadership, capacity planning, and scaling
  • Architect and evolve the end-to-end ad event pipeline - from client beacon receipt through validation, deduplication, enrichment, and downstream fan-out - under strict latency and throughput constraints
  • Scale our event ingestion infrastructure to handle billions of events per day with high availability, exactly-once semantics, and sub-second processing SLAs
  • Design and implement robust deduplication and validation systems that ensure event accuracy across retries, network failures, and client-side inconsistencies
  • Build and operate stream processing pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or equivalent) that power real-time signals for pacing, frequency capping, and reporting
  • Define and maintain authoritative event schemas and data contracts that serve as the source of truth for billing, advertiser reporting, and ML feature pipelines
  • Partner closely with Ad Serving, Pacing, Reporting, and Science teams to ensure event data meets the accuracy, latency, and completeness requirements of each consumer
  • Drive operational excellence: reliability, observability, deployment automation, capacity planning, and incident leadership across the eventing stack
  • Drive modularization and platform-thinking: build reusable components and clean interfaces that let the team and partner teams move faster

Skills & Experience We're Seeking
  • 10+ years building distributed systems and backend services at large scale; 3+ years in the ads domain
  • Deep experience with high-throughput event ingestion and stream processing at scale - Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, or equivalent
  • Built and operated event deduplication, validation, and attribution systems in an ads or similarly high-stakes data environment
  • Strong understanding of exactly-once and at-least-once delivery semantics, idempotency patterns, and the tradeoffs between them
  • Experience designing event schemas and data contracts that serve multiple downstream consumers with different latency and consistency requirements
  • Familiarity with ad measurement concepts: impression tracking, viewability, click attribution, completion rates, and IAB standards
  • Track record of technical leadership across multiple teams, setting architectural direction and influencing cross-functional roadmaps
  • Comfortable at the intersection of engineering, data, and product - translating advertiser reporting requirements and billing accuracy needs into production systems
  • Demonstrated ability to operate in an environment that is a mix of big-tech scale and startup speed, delivering production-ready results on tight timelines

Nice to Haves
  • Experience with CTV-specific event challenges: server-side ad insertion (SSAI), VAST/VMAP beacon tracking, live event traffic spikes
  • Familiarity with third-party measurement and verification integrations (MOAT, IAS, DoubleVerify, Nielsen)
  • Built or improved billing-grade event pipelines where accuracy directly impacts revenue reconciliation
  • Experience with experimentation infrastructure for event pipelines: validating schema changes, pipeline migrations, and deduplication logic without impacting downstream consumers
  • Strong background in resiliency and reliability: ensuring pipeline availability under extreme load (live events, traffic spikes, device-side retry storms)
  • Familiarity with privacy and compliance constraints on event data (GDPR, CCPA, data minimization)
  • Experience building observability and alerting frameworks for event pipelines - detecting drops, duplicates, and latency regressions in real time.

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 $499,000.00 - $900,000.00.
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. See more details about our Benefits here.
Netflix is a unique culture and environment. Learn more here.
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.

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About Netflix

Sourced by ZipRecruiter

Netflix is the world's leading streaming entertainment service with 222 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, feature films and mobile games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any Internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.

Industry

Arts, entertainment, and recreation

Company size

5,001 - 10,000 Employees

Headquarters location

Los Gatos, CA, US

Year founded

1997

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