Member of Technical Staff - Distributed Systems Engineer

reflectionai; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness

Meals in office

Life & parental leave

Unlimited vacation

Visa sponsorship

Team building

Job summary

Reflection seeks a senior software engineer to design, build, and operate the platform powering open-weight AI foundations. You’ll enable research, training, and production environments with scalable services and developer tooling.

You’ll own reliability targets, multi-tenant APIs, and high-performance systems, collaborating across research and infra in a fast-paced startup. Equity and growth opportunities accompany impact-focused work.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with production-grade systems.
• Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms handling large-scale data.
• Comfort navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for speed and reliability.
• Thrive in a fast-paced startup environment with bias toward action and impact.
• Excited about building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
• Collaborative, clear communicator across research and infra boundaries.
• Motivated by creating the software backbone for open-weight AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate shared services that multiple teams rely on across research and production workflows.
• Define and uphold reliability targets through SLIs, SLOs, and healthy on-call practices.
• Maintain strong operational readiness with runbooks, incident playbooks, and capacity planning.
• Ensure correctness and performance under load, addressing consistency, tail latency, and failure modes.
• Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms that enable high-velocity experimentation and iteration.
• Reduce operational burden through better tooling, standardization, and platform patterns that scale across teams.

Skills

Production systems

API design

Complex codebases

Startup mindset

Zero to one

Collaboration

Open-weight AI

Tools

Go

Rust

C++

gRPC

Protobuf

Job description

Our Mission

Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. We build open models that let anyone control their intelligence and help shape the future of AI. Our mission: make intelligence open and accessible to all.

Foundations

Vision:

Build and operate a company-wide foundations platform that accelerates every team by providing reliable, scalable developer infrastructure, SRE capabilities, and high-throughput data ingestion tooling enabling Reflection to move faster as we scale.

What This Team Does

Build and operate the core shared services that power our research, training, and production environments. These systems form the foundational platform that multiple teams depend on for model development, deployment, and evaluation, unifying data, compute, and workflow management across the stack while enabling rapid experimentation and reliable production systems.

• Build and operate shared services that multiple teams rely on across research and production workflows.

• Define and uphold reliability targets through SLIs, SLOs, and healthy on-call practices.

• Maintain strong operational readiness with runbooks, incident playbooks, and capacity planning.

• Ensure correctness and performance under load, addressing consistency, tail latency, and failure modes.

• Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms that enable high-velocity experimentation and iteration.

• Reduce operational burden through better tooling, standardization, and platform patterns that scale across teams.

What You'll Work With

• Container Abstractions: Containers-as-a-Service, Kubernetes abstraction layers, container orchestration, reproducible environments, multi-tenant isolation.

• Distributed Systems Architecture: Sharding, replication, coordination services, high-concurrency systems, concurrency control.

• Service Development Stack: gRPC, Protobuf, Go, Rust, C++.

• Reliability & Performance: Idempotency, retries, backpressure, SLI/SLO design, tail latency optimization, service reliability engineering.

About You

• Strong software engineering background with experience shipping production-grade systems.

• Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms that handle large-scale data or compute.

• Comfortable navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for reliability and speed.

• Thrive in a high-agency, fast-paced startup environment; bias toward action and impact.

• Excited about zero to one challenges, building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.

• Collaborative, clear communicator, and comfortable working across research and infra boundaries.

• Motivated by creating the software backbone for the world’s most capable open-weight AI systems.

What We Offer:

We believe that to make intelligence open and accessible to all, you need to start at the foundation. Joining Reflection means building from the ground up as part of a talent-dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the future of open foundational models.

We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.

• Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain our talent globally.

• Stock options: Everyone who joins and contributes to Reflection's success gets to share in the upside through stock options.

• Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life, with an annual wellness allowance.

• Meals: Lunch and dinner are provided in the office daily.

• Life & family: 22 weeks paid parental leave for all new birthing and non-birthing parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys.

• Vacation days: Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 days in the U.K.

• Sponsorship support: We sponsor visas to help exceptional talent join our team and support long-term immigration pathways where applicable.

• Team building: We have regular off-sites, happy hours, and team celebrations.

Export Control Notice: This position may require access to technology or source code subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Any offer of employment for this role may be conditioned on the Company's ability to provide the candidate with access to such technology or source code in compliance with applicable U.S. export control laws, which may require the Company to seek government authorization.