Staff Distributed Systems Engineer - Go & Data Platform

Orbis Operations; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

PTO policy

Competitive retirement matching

Job summary

Orbis Operations seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems to define architecture across Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform, moving and transforming data reliably. You will guide platform direction and lead a team building critical infrastructure.

The role emphasizes designing high-performance systems, ownership of CI/CD pipelines, and collaboration with stakeholders to deliver robust solutions for government and allied missions.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building distributed systems in production.
• Deep hands-on experience with Go in high-throughput, concurrent systems.
• Experience with message queues and streaming systems (e.g., NATS/JetStream, Kafka).
• Design experience with state machines and idempotent operations for robust recovery.
• Experience with gRPC/protobuf-based service boundaries and cross-system transfer protocols.
• Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Has set technical direction and can explain subsystem choices.
• Travel up to 25% for engagement and reviews (Middle East).

Responsibilities

• Define, maintain, and expand Go/Python frameworks for batch/streaming plugins.
• Drive data-movement patterns across diverse sources.
• Oversee lifecycle of critical components with automated tooling for security and upgrades.
• Design high-performance, low-latency architectures for workflows and streams.
• Define architecture across subsystems of Catalyst’s data plane and scale it.
• Act as domain expert across data lifecycle areas like event streaming and state management.
• Lead incident response and postmortems for core distributed paths.
• Review PRs for security, tests, and operational readiness, integrating scanners.

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Architecture design

On-call / incident response

Team leadership

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Pulumi

Ansible

GitHub Actions

Trivy

Dependabot

Datadog

Job description

Orbis Operations seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems to define architecture across Catalyst, our secure distributed data platform, moving and transforming data reliably. You will guide platform direction and lead a team building critical infrastructure.

The role emphasizes designing high-performance systems, ownership of CI/CD pipelines, and collaboration with stakeholders to deliver robust solutions for government and allied missions.