Distributed Systems Engineer

Tensorlake Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A forward-thinking technology startup in California is looking for an experienced Distributed Systems Engineer to join their dynamic team. In this role, you'll build and evolve the core infrastructure for a durable application runtime aimed at advanced data processing and machine learning workflows. Candidates should have over 5 years of experience in designing distributed systems from scratch and strong proficiency in Rust. This is a great opportunity to be part of developing pioneering AI data applications.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building distributed systems infrastructure from scratch.
• Experience writing production systems in Rust or other systems-level languages.
• Understanding of cluster schedulers, databases, and runtimes implementation.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve durable application runtime for data processing and ML workflows.
• Design and implement core components of the cluster scheduler.
• Write systems-level code in Rust.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Rust

Systems programming

C++

Concurrency

Tools

Rust

Python

FoundationDB

TypeScript

Go

Terraform

Job description

Our core mission at Tensorlake is to unlock your data wherever it is. We believe that people should have access to the best tools to parse, extract, and manipulate data, run data applications, so they can spend more time putting knowledge into action.

We’re looking for engineers who want to build the operating system for AI Data Applications and Workflows.

About the role

We're looking for experienced distributed systems engineers to build the core infrastructure for our durable application runtime. This is a systems programming role—you'll be writing the schedulers, runtimes, and data plane components that other engineers build applications on top of. Some of the things you'll work on in this role

• Build and evolve our durable application runtime to support advanced data processing and machine learning workflows
• Design and implement core components of our cluster scheduler to improve resource utilization, reduce costs, and maximize performance
• Write systems-level code in Rust for our data plane and execution engine
• Design and build new capabilities for our SDKs
• Work closely with the rest of the engineering team to take something from an idea to a polished product

About you

• You have 5+ years of experience building distributed systems infrastructure—not configuring or operating it, but designing and implementing it from scratch
• You've written production systems in Rust or other systems programming languages (C, C++, Go at the systems level)
• You understand how cluster schedulers, databases, and runtimes work at the implementation level because you've built or contributed to them
• You can autonomously lead, design, and build fault-tolerant systems
• You enjoy diving deep into performance challenges at the systems level—memory allocation, concurrency primitives, network protocols
• You want to be part of the entire product development process, from customer research to implementation

This role is not a fit if...

• Your experience is primarily in DevOps, SRE, or platform operations (Terraform, Kubernetes administration, CI/CD pipelines)
• You're looking for a role focused on automation, tooling, or infrastructure-as-code rather than building core systems
• You haven't written substantial code in a systems programming language

Things you should know

• We’re a startup, and we expect people to be able to wear multiple hats at any given time.
• We’re distributed across the US and Europe, and everyone is self-sufficient to get work done even when nobody else is around.
• We do not expect people to work all the time, but we expect everyone to follow up on their commitments.
• We’re a small team with high ownership and we’re passionate about what we do.
• Our tech stack is somehow diverse. You’d be mostly working with Rust, Python and FoundationDB on your day to day. But you’ll also need to understand TypeScript, Go, and Terraform enough to touch parts of our backend infrastructure.