Staff Distributed Systems Engineer – Platform & Reliability

reflectionai

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 130,000 - 190,000

Full time

14 days+
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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.

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