Staff Distributed Systems Engineer – Platform & Reliability

reflectionai; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness

Meals in office

Life & parental leave

Unlimited vacation

Visa sponsorship

Team building

Job summary

Reflection seeks a senior software engineer to design, build, and operate the platform powering open-weight AI foundations. You’ll enable research, training, and production environments with scalable services and developer tooling.

You’ll own reliability targets, multi-tenant APIs, and high-performance systems, collaborating across research and infra in a fast-paced startup. Equity and growth opportunities accompany impact-focused work.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background with production-grade systems.
• Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms handling large-scale data.
• Comfort navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for speed and reliability.
• Thrive in a fast-paced startup environment with bias toward action and impact.
• Excited about building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
• Collaborative, clear communicator across research and infra boundaries.
• Motivated by creating the software backbone for open-weight AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate shared services that multiple teams rely on across research and production workflows.
• Define and uphold reliability targets through SLIs, SLOs, and healthy on-call practices.
• Maintain strong operational readiness with runbooks, incident playbooks, and capacity planning.
• Ensure correctness and performance under load, addressing consistency, tail latency, and failure modes.
• Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms that enable high-velocity experimentation and iteration.
• Reduce operational burden through better tooling, standardization, and platform patterns that scale across teams.

Skills

Production systems

API design

Complex codebases

Startup mindset

Zero to one

Collaboration

Open-weight AI

Tools

Go

Rust

C++

gRPC

Protobuf

Job description

Reflection seeks a senior software engineer to design, build, and operate the platform powering open-weight AI foundations. You’ll enable research, training, and production environments with scalable services and developer tooling.

You’ll own reliability targets, multi-tenant APIs, and high-performance systems, collaborating across research and infra in a fast-paced startup. Equity and growth opportunities accompany impact-focused work.