Sr. Distributed Systems Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 1, 2026. First seen by Alion on Jun 17, 2025.
Role
As a distributed systems engineer, you’ll work across the stack to solve problems as they come up and help build Archil volumes. You’ll have significant influence over the technical and product direction.
We’ll expect you to be able to:
Be oncall for a production system to help our customers if anything goes wrong.
Build out never-before-seen capabilities in a storage service
Design distributed systems interactions for atomicity and idempotency
Deploy infrastructure and generalize infrastructure across different clouds
Operate through changing customer requirements with lots of ambiguity
Lead teams of engineers through complex decisions and PR feedback
Who are you?
You have 6+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems (flexible).
Ideally, you’ve worked at a startup before, so you know how chaotic this time can be.
You’ve successfully resolved disagreements at work before, and you understand that the highest priority is helping our customers - not being right.
You’re comfortable debugging problems that occur as a result of failures in multiple, different systems, using tools like metrics and logs.
You’ve been paged at 3am to solve a complex production issue before.
You’re knowledgeable about distributed systems: you get how consensus works, you know how to scale systems, and you know what pitfalls in API design to avoid.
You’re familiar with how to optimize the performance of a system, including a general sense of how much latency different operations take, and what kind of bottlenecks could lead to a reduction in potential throughput.
Most of all, you know how computers work from the silicon up. Someone once asked you in an interview “what happens when you go to Google.com ”, and there wasn’t enough time in the interview to talk about all of the steps.
Why join us?
By building the highest-performance, simplest storage product in the cloud, we have a great chance of changing how the world builds the next-generation of applications (and with AI, more applications will be written in the next 5 years than ever before). We’d love for your to be a part of our journey.
How to join?
Show us that you’re knowledgeable about the space that we’re working in on your application. It’s up to you how you do this, but one potential way is by answering one of the following questions:
How do you think our system works?
What do you think our biggest technical challenge is?
What would make our system not work?
About Archil
Archil is on a mission to change how developers build applications in the cloud, by building the next, default storage platform in the cloud.
Over the past 15 years, S3 has become the default way to store inactive data sets in the cloud, but the next-generation of AI and analytics applications need to actively process more data than ever before. We're solving this problem by building the first Volume storage product that's as fast as EBS, infinitely scaleable like S3, and connects to existing data sets in S3 and other repositories. Our customers choose Archil because this architecture radically simplifies how they think about working with their data (every application becomes stateless, no cold-start latencies, and no need to worry about checkpointing or backup). Hacker News agrees.
Hunter, the founder, has 10 years of experience building and operating cloud storage, including helping to launch Amazon's EFS product and working on bleeding-edge storage at Netflix. He started the company after working with hundreds of customers across these roles, and identifying a need for a new kind of storage product.
We're fully in-person in San Francisco. If you're also someone interested in distributed systems, completely focused on how to make customers successful, and interested in solving really big technical challenges, we'd love for you to join us.