Remote Staff Engineering Manager — Distributed Systems Lead

BNSF; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) and Railroad Retirement program

Health care options for dependents

HSA with employer contributions

Family benefits and leave programs

Bonus opportunity

Job summary

BNSF Railway's technology division (BNSF Tech) seeks a staff engineering manager to lead a team of engineers, guiding end-to-end technical execution for distributed systems that power freight operations across North America. The role emphasizes safety, inclusion, and excellence while enabling movement of essential products.

This is a remote, full-time leadership position with travel up to 20% and sponsorship for eligible visa holders. Location can be anywhere within the contiguous 48 states.

Qualifications

• Authorized to work in the U.S.
• 9+ years as software engineer and/or manager
• 6+ years as an engineer
• Experience with distributed systems and related tech
• CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and DevOps
• Experience with open-source platforms and infra
• Observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Secure coding practices
• Able to work in cross-functional teams
• Experience in design reviews, incident retrospectives or RFCs
• Ability to learn new technical concepts quickly
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Experience leading multiple teams

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 6–10 engineers, guiding end-to-end technical execution.
• Drive the technical vision and strategy across distributed systems.
• Mentor junior and senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align on solutions.
• Ensure secure coding practices and platform reliability.
• Own the architecture for large-scale systems and make key decisions.
• Translate railroad business requirements into scalable digital solutions.
• Establish engineering best practices, observability, and debt management.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve production issues; participate in 24/7 on-call.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

Cloud platforms

Security practices

Observability

DevOps / CI-CD

Communication

Stakeholder management

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

API gateways

SQL/NoSQL/Graph DBs

Serverless

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus Grafana

Git & CI/CD

AWS/Azure/GCP

Job description

BNSF Railway's technology division (BNSF Tech) seeks a staff engineering manager to lead a team of engineers, guiding end-to-end technical execution for distributed systems that power freight operations across North America. The role emphasizes safety, inclusion, and excellence while enabling movement of essential products.

This is a remote, full-time leadership position with travel up to 20% and sponsorship for eligible visa holders. Location can be anywhere within the contiguous 48 states.