Lead Distributed Messaging & Systems Architect

SciTec; Boulder (CO); On-site; USD 164,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4% Safe Harbor 401(k) match

100% company paid HSA Medical

80% company paid Dental

100% company paid Vision

100% company paid Life

100% company paid Long-term Disability

Short-term Disability

Annual Profit-Sharing Plan

Discretionary Performance Bonus

Paid Parental Leave

Generous Paid Time Off

Flexible Work Hours

Job summary

SciTec in Colorado is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead how distributed workloads communicate across processes, services, and containers for mission-critical data processing and visualization. The role blends hands-on software work with technical leadership.

You will evaluate messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, gRPC, ZeroMQ), create reference implementations, mentor engineers, and collaborate with storage and deployment domains to improve throughput, latency, and reliability

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems.
• Deep production experience with one or more message brokers or event streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, MQTT).
• Experience with RPC or low-level messaging frameworks (gRPC, ZeroMQ).
• Understanding of delivery semantics, ordering, idempotency, backpressure, and fault handling.

Responsibilities

• Assess current communication technologies, patterns, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• Define evaluation criteria and run load tests to select and maintain recommended technologies and practices.
• Document ADRs, reference architectures, and troubleshooting guides.
• Build reference implementations, starter templates, and shared libraries for common use cases.
• Guide patterns for sync/async messaging, event streaming, and data schemas.
• Collaborate with Data Storage and Deployment Environments domains on cross-domain issues.
• Mentor engineers and lead design/code reviews to ensure adoption of best practices.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical writing

Mentoring

Load testing

Linux development

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

ActiveMQ

MQTT

gRPC

ZeroMQ

Protocol Buffers

Avro

JSON Schema

Job description

SciTec in Colorado is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead how distributed workloads communicate across processes, services, and containers for mission-critical data processing and visualization. The role blends hands-on software work with technical leadership.

You will evaluate messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, gRPC, ZeroMQ), create reference implementations, mentor engineers, and collaborate with storage and deployment domains to improve throughput, latency, and reliability