Principal Distributed Systems Engineer

Alpheva; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 331,000; Full time

Job summary

Alpheva is seeking a senior distributed-systems engineer for remote, project-based work. The role requires deep expertise in concurrency, databases, messaging, and reliability engineering, with staff-level or principal leadership experience.

Work is remote and contract-based, with hours and scope aligned to project matching. The listed hourly range applies to matched engagements (no upfront fixed hours). Payouts are handled per project terms and will be clarified before scale-up.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building production backend or distributed systems.
• Expertise in concurrency, databases, messaging, consensus tradeoffs, and reliability engineering.
• Staff, principal, architect, or equivalent technical-leadership experience.

Responsibilities

• Review distributed-system designs for consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, and operability.
• Analyze service boundaries, state management, messaging guarantees, and database behavior.
• Identify race conditions, bottlenecks, ambiguous invariants, unsafe retry behavior, and tradeoffs hidden by simplified explanations.
• Provide reference architectures and code-review feedback reflecting senior engineering judgment.

Skills

Concurrency

Databases

Messaging

Reliability

Technical leadership

Job description

Review distributed-system designs and implementations for consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, performance, and production operability.

Analyze service boundaries, state management, messaging guarantees, database behavior, and failure recovery under realistic production conditions.

Identify race conditions, scaling bottlenecks, ambiguous invariants, unsafe retry behavior, and tradeoffs hidden by simplified explanations.

Provide reference architectures and code-review feedback that reflect staff- or principal-level engineering judgment.

Remote, project-based contract work. Scope and hours depend on project matching; the listed hourly range applies to matched work.

Requirements

• 10+ years building production backend or distributed systems
• Expertise in concurrency, databases, messaging, consensus tradeoffs, and reliability engineering
• Staff, principal, architect, or equivalent technical-leadership experience

Pay

$160-$240/hr

Alpheva is a new expert network (launched September 2026); payout methods are not published yet, so confirm your first payment before scaling up.