Senior Staff Engineer, Open Source Server
Leads the design, implementation, and operation of core open-source distributed-server capabilities while mentoring engineers and setting technical direction. Requires 12+ years building production distributed systems, strong backend expertise, and experience with reliability, performance, and operability.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and implementation of important server features from proposal through rollout.
- Set technical direction for one or more areas of the open-source server team.
- Solve distributed-systems problems involving task matching, scheduling, workflow execution, visibility, quotas, throttling, persistence, developer primitives, and workflow lifecycle features.
- Balance reliability, performance, operability, product needs, and open-source usability.
- Partner with engineering, product, cloud, and customer-facing teams to develop technical plans.
- Improve testing, observability, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and documentation.
- Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and guide technical decisions.
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience building and operating production distributed systems.
- Strong technical leadership experience, including leading design work, aligning engineers, and driving complex projects to completion.
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, scheduling, and performance.
- Production experience with Go, Java, or a similar backend language.
- Experience with high-scale or performance-critical systems such as request-serving paths, task queues, scheduling systems, streaming or replication pipelines, rate limiting, sharding, load balancing, workflow engines, or orchestration systems.
- Operational expertise in reliability, observability, debugging, incident response, and system operability.
- Experience designing APIs, primitives, or platform features used by other developers.
- Experience with open-source systems or communities.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, ClickHouse, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.
- Experience with Kubernetes controllers, CRDs, KEDA, or Argo.
Compensation
- Annual salary range: $208,000–$341,250.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Go, Java, Concurrency, Fault Tolerance, Scheduling, Performance Optimization, Observability, Incident Response, AWS, Kubernetes, Postgres, MySQL, Opensearch, Cassandra
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