Staff Distributed Systems Engineer — Open Foundations Platform

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

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness

Meals provided

Parental leave

Unlimited vacation

Visa sponsorship

Team off-sites

Job summary

Reflection is seeking a senior software engineer to build and operate the core foundations platform powering AI research, training, and production environments.

You will design APIs, services, and tools for scalable data and compute, collaborating across research and infra to drive reliability with SLIs/SLOs and fast iteration, shaping the software backbone for open-weight AI systems.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background shipping production-grade systems.
• Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms that handle large-scale data or compute.
• Comfortable navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for reliability and speed.
• Thrive in a high-agency, fast-paced startup environment; bias toward action and impact.
• Excited about zero to one challenges, building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
• Collaborative, clear communicator, and comfortable working across research and infra boundaries.
• Motivated by creating the software backbone for the world’s most capable open-weight AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate core shared services powering research, training, and production environments.
• Define reliability targets with SLIs, SLOs, and on-call practices.
• Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms enabling high-velocity experimentation.
• Reduce operational burden through tooling and standardization.
• Collaborate across research and infra to scale platforms for multiple teams.

Skills

Production-grade systems

APIs & services

Large-scale data

Collaborative communication

Tools

Go

Rust

C++

Protobuf

gRPC

Job description

Reflection is seeking a senior software engineer to build and operate the core foundations platform powering AI research, training, and production environments.

You will design APIs, services, and tools for scalable data and compute, collaborating across research and infra to drive reliability with SLIs/SLOs and fast iteration, shaping the software backbone for open-weight AI systems.