Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems & Reliability

Jobtailor; Oregon (WI); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Unlimited PTO

Career growth

Equity incentives

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking a senior systems architect to lead design of distributed platforms and runtimes, focusing on correctness, security, and scalable observability. You will define durable execution models, create APIs/SDKs, and drive versioning while ensuring strong data integrity and reliability across teams.

This role emphasizes mentorship, architecture across domains, and industry best practices. The ideal candidate has extensive experience with state machines, event sourcing, idempotency,

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building distributed/platform systems with cross-team architecture influence.
• Proven work on mission-critical runtimes or workflow/orchestration systems.
• Deep expertise in durable execution and exactly/at-least-once semantics.
• Security and governance experience in production systems (auth, RBAC, audit, policy).
• Hands-on observability and trace correlation across async boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Develop the core execution model (state machine, lifecycle, resource model, failure semantics).
• Design platform APIs/SDKs connecting workflows, agents, tools, and product surfaces.
• Drive versioning & compatibility.
• Guarantee correctness via idempotency, deterministic replays, compensating actions, and data integrity.
• Engineer reliability at scale: concurrency controls, rate limits, backpressure, sharding/partitioning, and workload isolation.
• Build security & governance into the core: RBAC/ABAC, policy enforcement, fine-grained audit & lineage.
• Deliver observability: distributed tracing, structured logs, metrics, and evaluation hooks.
• Build an “explainable trail” of agent actions.
• Own quality: design reviews, test strategy, performance baselines, SLOs, incident response, and postmortems.
• Mentor & unblock senior engineers.

Skills

State Machines

Event Sourcing

Saga/Compensation

Idempotency

Observability (Grafana)

Performance Tuning

Go

Rust

Java

TypeScript

Containers

CI/CD

IaC

Concurrency Controls

Data Integrity

Tools

APIs

SDKs

Distributed Tracing

Structured Logs

Metrics

Job description

Jobtailor is seeking a senior systems architect to lead design of distributed platforms and runtimes, focusing on correctness, security, and scalable observability. You will define durable execution models, create APIs/SDKs, and drive versioning while ensuring strong data integrity and reliability across teams.

This role emphasizes mentorship, architecture across domains, and industry best practices. The ideal candidate has extensive experience with state machines, event sourcing, idempotency,