Lead Distributed Systems Engineer

Job Description

We have an exciting and rewarding opportunity for you to take your software engineering career to the next level.

As a Distributed Systems Engineer at JPMorganChase, you’ll serve as a seasoned member of an agile team to design and deliver trusted, market-leading technology products in a secure, stable, and scalable way. You will be responsible for building and evolving critical backend platforms and services that operate reliably at scale across multiple systems, regions, and environments-supporting the firm’s business objectives.

We are seeking a dedicated professional who is a strong team player, self-motivated, and driven to achieve engineering excellence on short timescales.

This is an extremely hands-on, delivery-focused, technical position involving deep analysis, coding, testing, performance tuning, and close partnership with product, SRE/operations, and end users. Prior experience in financial services is desirable, but curiosity, strong fundamentals, and the ability to learn quickly are just as important. The role involves a high degree of teamwork, technical design reviews, and peer interaction.

Job Responsibilities

• Executes software solutions: leads design, development, and technical troubleshooting, thinking beyond routine approaches to build resilient distributed solutions and break down complex production problems.
• Builds secure, high-quality production services: develops and maintains low-latency and/or high-throughput services, background workers, and APIs with strong correctness and reliability guarantees.
• Designs for scale and reliability: produces architecture and design artifacts for complex distributed applications (e.g., service decomposition, data consistency patterns, caching, failover) and ensures design constraints are met in implementation.
• Ensures operational excellence: owns systems end-to-end including observability (metrics/logs/traces), incident response, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
• Works with large, diverse datasets: gathers, analyzes, and synthesizes signals from production telemetry and business data to drive continuous improvement and to inform reliability and scalability work.
• Identifies systemic issues: proactively detects hidden failure modes (hot partitions, thundering herds, cascading failures, backpressure gaps) and drives improvements to coding hygiene, testing strategy, and architecture.
• Collaborates across teams: partners with platform, infrastructure, security, and dependent application teams to deliver well-integrated capabilities and clear service contracts.
• Contributes to engineering communities: participates in communities of practice and events that explore new and emerging technologies and raises the bar through mentoring and design/code review.
• Builds inclusive culture: contributes to a team culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect.

Required qualifications, Capabilities & Skills

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related discipline.
• Recent, hands-on experience building distributed systems in one or more modern object-oriented languages.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, consensus basics, idempotency, concurrency, retries/timeouts, leader election, partitioning, replication, and failure handling.
• Practical experience in system design, application development, testing, and operational stability in production environments.
• Experience developing, debugging, and maintaining code in a large corporate environment, including familiarity with database querying and data modeling (SQL and/or NoSQL).
• Solid knowledge of the Software Development Life Cycle and engineering best practices (code review, automated testing, secure coding, release management).
• Working knowledge of agile methodologies and modern delivery practices such as CI/CD, application resiliency, and security controls.

Preferred qualifications, capabilities & skills

• Strong technology generalist - experience building highly performant and resilient enterprise applications used within a high performance/realtime environment.
• Experience working in a team with a strong software development process (build, test, deploy etc).
• Experience in developing, debugging, and maintaining code in a large corporate environment with one or more modern programming languages and database querying languages
• A desire to learn more about the Financial products.