Senior Cloud-Scale Distributed Systems Engineer

Leadout Capital; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wellbeing reimbursement

Parental leave

Adoption assistance

Fertility benefits

Job summary

Leadout Capital in San Francisco seeks a Distributed Systems Software Engineer for Public Cloud at Senior/Lead/Principal levels. You will design scalable backend services with a focus on reliability, security, and performance across thousands of nodes.

You will work with Kubernetes, Terraform, and AI-powered tooling, contribute to open source like Spinnaker, and shape system context. On-call rotations and collaboration with multiple teams are expected.

Qualifications

• 3+ years backend software development experience.
• Deep knowledge of programming in Java, GoLang, Python, or Ruby.
• Experience owning and operating multiple instances of a critical service.
• A demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering.
• Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor).
• Advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts.
• Experience with Agile development methodology and Test Driven Development.
• Experience with critical infrastructure services including monitoring, alerting, logging, and reporting applications.
• Experience with distributed database systems and relational databases like Postgres is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Deliver cloud infrastructure automation tools, frameworks, workflows, and validation platforms on public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba).
• Design, develop, debug, and operate resilient distributed systems across thousands of compute nodes in multiple data centers.
• Use and contribute to open source tech (Spinnaker, Zookeeper, etc.).
• Develop Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform.
• Write microservices on Kubernetes, Docker, Mesos.
• Build production-grade software with AI-driven tooling to deliver secure, optimized code.
• Design AI-enabled workflows that integrate into human processes.
• Contribute to the shared system context and design standards for reliable AI operation.
• Critically evaluate code for correctness, security, and performance.
• Resolve complex issues and drive innovations for availability and performance.
• Balance live-site management, feature delivery, and debt retirement; participate in on-call rotations.

Skills

Backend experience

Java

Go

Python

Ruby

AI-first approach

AI tools

Agile

TDD

Monitoring

Education

Related technical degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Spinnaker

Zookeeper

OpenAI API

Cursor

Windsurf

Claude

GitHub Copilot

Codex

Job description

Leadout Capital in San Francisco seeks a Distributed Systems Software Engineer for Public Cloud at Senior/Lead/Principal levels. You will design scalable backend services with a focus on reliability, security, and performance across thousands of nodes.

You will work with Kubernetes, Terraform, and AI-powered tooling, contribute to open source like Spinnaker, and shape system context. On-call rotations and collaboration with multiple teams are expected.