Staff Distributed Systems Engineer - Scalable Data Platform

Orbis; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive retirement matching

PTO and flexible time off

Job summary

Orbis seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems to shape platform architecture for Catalyst, our secure data platform. You will own architecture across messaging, state, and reconciliation layers, guiding a team building mission-critical infrastructure. International travel up to 25% is required.

The role emphasizes Go expertise, distributed systems leadership, and close collaboration with customers and product teams to deliver reliable data movement at scale.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building distributed systems in production
• Go in high-throughput, concurrent systems
• Experience with message queues and streaming systems (Kafka/NATS)
• Designing state machines and idempotent operations
• Experience with gRPC/protobuf-based service boundaries
• Security clearance (Secret or above) preferred

Responsibilities

• Define and expand Go/Python frameworks for data movement and integration
• Drive design of high-performance, low-latency architectures
• Manage lifecycle of critical components and upgrades
• Define architecture across multiple subsystems of Catalyst
• Lead incident response and postmortems for core paths
• Architect CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for testing and deployment

Skills

Distributed systems

Go programming

gRPC/protobuf

Message queues

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Security clearance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related

Tools

Docker

GitHub Actions

Pulumi/Ansible

Datadog

Job description

Orbis seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems to shape platform architecture for Catalyst, our secure data platform. You will own architecture across messaging, state, and reconciliation layers, guiding a team building mission-critical infrastructure. International travel up to 25% is required.

The role emphasizes Go expertise, distributed systems leadership, and close collaboration with customers and product teams to deliver reliable data movement at scale.