Sr/Distinguished Architect, Core Systems

Burtch Works; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Burtch Works is seeking a Senior / Distinguished Architect to design and build the core technology platform. This deeply hands‑on, individual‑contributor role reports to the CTO and spans databases, distributed systems, compilers, runtimes, and high‑performance computing.

You will shape the computational foundation for scalable workloads and collaborate across teams to ensure architecture supports rapid product evolution, with a focus on performance and correctness.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of deep software engineering experience in enterprise platforms.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Substantial contributions to database engines, distributed databases, or compiler/runtime systems.
• Strong systems programming in Rust, C++, or C.
• Theoretical foundations in CS or mathematics with hands-on modeling ability.

Responsibilities

• Design the architecture for storage engines, distributed execution, and query processing.
• Engineer high-performance systems with attention to memory, caching, and vectorized execution.
• Build scalable distributed systems that stay correct under concurrency and failures.
• Define execution interfaces and optimization boundaries for multiple compute technologies.
• Perform low-level systems programming with a focus on correctness and performance.
• Apply AI coding agents to prototype, test, benchmark, and diagnose failures.

Skills

15+ years experience

Systems programming

Rust

C++

Distributed systems

Database internals

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Senior / Distinguished Architect, Core Systems

Remote (US)

About The Company

Our client is a fast-growing, AI-first enterprise software company. Its planning platform helps some of the world’s largest brands make faster, smarter decisions. It brings planning work that usually sits in separate silos onto one platform, which cuts waste and recovers value that large enterprises lose to inefficiency. The company is well funded, operates globally and has a strong record of growth.

The Role

The company is looking for an exceptional computer scientist to help design and build the next generation of its core technology platform. This is a deeply hands‑on, senior individual‑contributor role. You’ll work directly with the CTO and other senior architects on foundational systems problems spanning databases, distributed systems, compilers and runtimes, high‑performance computing and low‑level software architecture.

“Architect” is the company’s premier individual‑contributor technical track. Architects are expected to stay deeply embedded in the code: defining fundamental abstractions, building prototypes and critical software, reviewing implementations, benchmarking systems and investigating complex failures.

The Mission

Build the computational foundation that lets the platform handle much greater scale, broader classes of enterprise workloads, predictable performance and rapid product evolution, without tying applications to a single physical execution model.

What You’ll Do

• Execution Platform Architecture: Design the systems architecture that sits beneath the application and semantic layers. Your work will span storage engines, distributed execution, query processing, compilation, runtimes, caching, metadata, scheduling, resource management, concurrency and fault tolerance.
• High‑Performance Systems Engineering: Treat performance as a fundamental architectural property. Reason deeply about memory layout, cache behavior, data structures, indexing, compression, serialization, network and storage I/O, vectorized execution, synchronization and algorithmic complexity. The focus is on predictable tail behavior and useful work per unit of infrastructure, not just attractive microbenchmarks.
• Distributed Systems at Scale: Design systems that stay correct under concurrency, contention, partial failure and elastic scale. Solve hard problems in data and computation placement, replication, consistency models, recovery, workload isolation, routing and noisy‑neighbor behavior.
• Logical and Physical Separation: Partner with the application and semantic‑platform teams to keep business logic independent of any specific physical engine. Define execution interfaces and optimization boundaries so sophisticated workloads run on the right compute technologies without leaking implementation details upward.
• Systems Programming: Drive low‑level, performance‑sensitive engineering in systems languages such as Rust, C++ or C. Focus on architecture, algorithms, representations and correctness rather than working as a single‑language specialist.
• AI‑Native Engineering: Make heavy use of modern AI coding agents to explore unfamiliar systems, prototype alternatives, generate tests, build benchmarks, perform large refactors and diagnose failures. Apply rigorous judgment when validating AI‑generated code, catching invalid assumptions about distributed behavior, concurrency bugs, unsafe memory behavior and subtle performance regressions.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience: 15+ years of deep software engineering experience, with a proven record of designing, building and scaling advanced enterprise software platforms.
• Education: A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics or a related quantitative field.
• Core Systems Contributions: Substantial contributions to database engines, distributed databases, analytical systems, storage engines, query processors or optimizers, distributed‑compute frameworks, or compiler and runtime systems.
• Technical Depth: Deep expertise in several of these areas: database internals, distributed systems, concurrency, consistency, fault tolerance, query processing, compilers and runtimes, memory architecture, resource scheduling or performance engineering.
• Programming Mastery: Strong systems‑programming ability in Rust, C++, C or comparable languages.
• Theoretical Rigor: Strong foundations in theoretical computer science or mathematics, plus the ability to reason rigorously about unfamiliar systems from first principles.
• Builder Mindset: Comfortable moving between theoretical models, architectures, profiler traces, benchmarks and raw source code.

Why This Role

• You’ll shape the foundation of an AI‑first platform that is used to automate millions of enterprise decisions.
• You’ll work directly with a CTO and leadership team who are deeply technical and still write code every day.
• You’ll join a fast‑growing global company with the resources and momentum to take on hard, long‑horizon systems problems.

Our client is an equal‑opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.