Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

fomo Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

fomo Labs is seeking a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own the reliability, scalability, and performance of our multi-region backend platform. You will own critical shared infrastructure, including datastores, caches, messaging systems, and regional services, and design systems that stay predictable during traffic surges and outages.

This is a hands-on role with direct production ownership, building and operating components while improving data systems and observability for a rapidly

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience designing and debugging distributed, high-throughput production systems.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience with performance, indexing, replication, transaction contention, and failure modes.
• Strong Redis-compatible systems experience including sharding, replication, memory management, hot keys, and failure handling.
• Experience operating services on AWS, ideally using ECS, RDS, and ElastiCache.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform.
• Proficiency in Go, TypeScript/Node.js, or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Hands-on experience designing and testing failover and disaster-recovery systems, including backup restoration, replication, regional failover, and RTO/RPO validation.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate high-throughput, multi-region services.
• Improve datastore and cache performance, capacity, replication, and failure handling.
• Implement backpressure, concurrency limits, load shedding, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and bounded retries.
• Reduce cross-region latency and improve data locality.
• Design and test service, datastore, and regional failover procedures.
• Help architect new features to operate at scale from day one.
• Level‑up the team on how to think about scale.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Go

TypeScript/Node.js

PostgreSQL

Redis

AWS

Terraform

Failover testing

Observability

Backup/DR planning

Tools

NATS JetStream

Kafka

Datadog APM

Job description

About the role

fomo is a trading app for the rest of us. With fomo you can sign up in seconds and have instant access to any asset on-chain without the need for external wallets, bridges or prior knowledge. fomo has social features that are actually useful - follow top traders (with full access to their portfolio and trades) and find tokens early. fomo does all of this while providing the best-in-class execution and data for experienced traders.

https://x.com/fomo

About the role

We are looking for a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own the reliability, scalability, and performance of our multi-region backend platform.

You will own critical shared infrastructure, including datastores, caches, messaging systems, and regional application services, and design systems that remain predictable during traffic surges, dependency failures, infrastructure changes, and partial regional outages.

You will also establish new failover and disaster-recovery capabilities within our stack, including defining recovery objectives and implementing the systems and testing required to recover services and data safely.

This is a hands‑on engineering role with direct ownership of production systems. You will build and operate application and infrastructure components while improving data systems and observability.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate high-throughput, multi-region services.

• Improve datastore and cache performance, capacity, replication, and failure handling.

• Implement backpressure, concurrency limits, load shedding, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and bounded retries.

• Reduce cross-region latency and improve data locality.

• Design and test service, datastore, and regional failover procedures.

• Help architect new features to operate at scale from day one.

• Level‑up the team on how to think about scale.

Qualifications

• 8 or more years of backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience designing and debugging distributed, high-throughput production systems.

• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including query performance, indexing, connection pooling, replication, transaction contention, and failure modes.

• Strong experience with Redis-compatible systems such as Redis, Valkey, Dragonfly, or KeyDB, including sharding, replication, memory management, hot keys, and failure handling.

• Experience operating services on AWS, ideally using ECS, RDS, and ElastiCache.

• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform.

• Proficiency in Go, TypeScript/Node.js, or a comparable systems-oriented language.

• Hands‑on experience designing and testing failover and disaster-recovery systems, including backup restoration, replication, regional failover, and RTO/RPO validation.

Nice to have

• Experience with NATS JetStream, Kafka, or another durable messaging system.

• Familiarity with Datadog APM and AWS Performance Insights.

• Experience performing live datastore or cache topology migrations.

• Experience operating systems with bursty or unpredictable traffic.

• Experience with financial, trading, cryptocurrency, gaming, or other high-throughput systems.