Staff Distributed Systems Engineer — Real-Time Infra

Alexander Chapman; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Alexander Chapman is seeking a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own and scale critical production infrastructure. You will lead design and operation of high-throughput, multi-region services, ensuring reliability, performance, and data integrity across regions.

The role emphasizes building failover, disaster recovery, and observability capabilities while mentoring engineers and raising the team's technical bar for operating systems at scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in backend, platform, or distributed systems engineering.
• Deep experience with high-throughput, distributed production systems.
• Strong PostgreSQL performance, replication, and failure mode knowledge.
• Experience with AWS, Terraform, and reliability-focused architectures.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate high-throughput, multi-region backend services.
• Own reliability, scalability, and performance of shared infrastructure.
• Improve datastore and cache performance, replication, and failure handling.
• Implement backpressure, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and bounded retries.
• Reduce cross-region latency and improve data locality.
• Test failover procedures and disaster recovery strategies.
• Define and validate RTO/RPO objectives for critical services.
• Enhance observability and operational tooling across the platform.
• Mentor engineers and raise the team's reliability bar.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Go / TypeScript

Observability

Failover / DR design

Performance tuning

Mentoring

Tools

Terraform

PostgreSQL

Redis

AWS (ECS/RDS/ElastiCache)

Datadog APM

NATS JetStream / Kafka

Job description

Alexander Chapman is seeking a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own and scale critical production infrastructure. You will lead design and operation of high-throughput, multi-region services, ensuring reliability, performance, and data integrity across regions.

The role emphasizes building failover, disaster recovery, and observability capabilities while mentoring engineers and raising the team's technical bar for operating systems at scale.