Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

HighTouch; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 133,000 - 238,000; Full time

Job summary

A technology company is seeking a distributed systems engineer to enhance their syncing engine. You will tackle complex data challenges and have a significant impact on customer solutions. Ideal candidates are passionate about scalability and data processing, with a strong background in distributed systems. This role offers a competitive salary ranging from $180,000 to $320,000, along with equity compensation and a remote-first work policy.

Benefits

Equity compensation in form of ISO options

Remote-first work environment

Qualifications

• Experience with building syncing engines that handle terabytes of data daily.
• Knowledge of event collection or data streaming services.
• Ability to scale systems through significant growth.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance the syncing engine for optimal data flow.
• Work directly with customers to solve scaling challenges.
• Architect solutions for current and future scalability.

Skills

Distributed systems

Performance optimization

Troubleshooting

Scalable data processing

Real-time data syncing

Job description

Hightouch’s mission is to empower everyone to take action on their data. Hundreds of companies, including Autotrader, Calendly, Cars.com, Monday.com, and PetSmart, trust Hightouch to power their growth.

We pioneered the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP), which lets companies use their own data warehouse to collect, prepare, and activate customer data for marketing personalization and business operations. Our new AI Decisioning platform goes a step further, allowing marketers to set goals and guardrails that AI agents can then use to personalize 1:1 customer interactions.

Our team focuses on making a meaningful impact for our customers. We approach challenges with a first-principles mindset, move quickly and efficiently, and treat each other with compassion and kindness.

We’re based in San Francisco but have team members all over the world. Our Series C put us at a $1.2B valuation, and we are backed by leading investors such as Sapphire Ventures, Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Afore Capital.

About the Role

We are looking for a distributed systems engineer to work on the systems that power the syncing engine our customers and other engineering teams rely on. This presents an exciting challenge where you can apply your expertise in distributed systems, performance optimization, and troubleshooting to push the boundaries of what is possible and meaningfully improve our ability to move massive amounts of customer data.

We believe in enabling our engineers to do their best work for our customers by giving them extremely high levels of ownership and autonomy. This comes in different forms: you will own and deliver projects from start to finish, you will work directly with customers to solve their hardest scaling problems, and you will have a lot of influence over what we work on as a team and company.

Some of the problems we’ll be working on include:

• Sync Speed: Customers want to sync a lot of data to important destinations like Facebook and Snapchat, which requires us to analyze every part of our syncing process and find where we can optimize to sync data more quickly
• Streaming Syncing: We currently sync data from sources in batch only, but envision a world where we also do syncs in real-time and support streaming sources like webhooks and queues
• Scalability and Reliability: As part of our rapid growth, we’re always evaluating current future bottlenecks in scaling and reliability, and architecting for the next order of magnitude of growth
• Personalization API: Our Personalization API product provides a low latency caching layer on top of data warehouses that enable customers to use their data warehouse for real-time personalization use cases with <30ms p90 response times with QPS in the millions
• Multi-Region and Multi-Cloud: Supporting our multi-region and multi-cloud backend, including extending it to launch Hightouch on in new regions to support data residency requirements of our global customer base

We are looking for talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals who are interested in tackling the problems above. The salary range for this position is $180,000 - $320,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation in the form of ISO options.

About You

You are an engineer with a passion for solving hard technical problems that generate real value for customers. You’re motivated by high ownership and are comfortable in a fast-paced, startup environment.

You have experience and comfort with distributed systems and high-scale systems or the ability and desire to build this experience quickly.

• You’ve built syncing engines that process and move terabytes of data per day in a scalable way
• You’ve created event collection or data streaming services that power company critical systems
• You’ve owned systems that have undergone orders of magnitude of growth and helped them scale accordingly
• You have relevant skills and are a fast learner who is excited to take on the challenges we face

Interview Process

Our goal with the interview process is to balance speed with giving both parties opportunities to assess whether there is a strong mutual fit. We will ask you questions, but we want you to ask us questions!

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [45m]: Designing a data processing feature end-to-end.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with the interviewer to architect a system at a conceptual level.