Distributed Systems Engineer

We are looking for a strong Distributed Systems Engineer to design, build and operate the core infrastructure powering our AI memory platform. You will work on the distributed backend services behind our Memory API, taking ownership of the complete serving infrastructure — from request handling and data storage to indexing, retrieval, observability and production reliability. This role requires strong software engineering fundamentals, hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems, and the ability to solve complex engineering challenges involving concurrency, data consistency, latency and scalability. You will have end-to-end ownership of critical infrastructure and work closely with the founding team to shape the technical architecture of the product.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop and operate distributed backend services that power the company's AI memory API.
• Own the end-to-end serving architecture, ensuring low latency, high availability, reliability and performance under heavy workloads.
• Build and maintain scalable storage and indexing systems that support concurrent reads and writes while ensuring data consistency and correctness.
• Design efficient data retrieval and processing mechanisms to support memory storage and retrieval at scale.
• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, system failures and infrastructure limitations.
• Build robust observability solutions using metrics, logs and distributed tracing to monitor system health and troubleshoot production issues.
• Manage production deployments, database migrations, version upgrades and rollback strategies while preventing data corruption or loss.
• Design systems that can gracefully handle failures, traffic spikes and increasing infrastructure demands.
• Take ownership of production reliability, debugging and continuous improvement of critical backend services.

Requirements:

• 3+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying and operating distributed systems in production environments.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency and computer networking.
• Strong programming proficiency in at least one language such as Python, Go, Rust or an equivalent language.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts, including fault tolerance, concurrency, data consistency and service communication.
• Hands-on experience with databases, storage systems and message queues, including designing, operating and troubleshooting them in production.
• Experience designing and developing scalable backend services, APIs and distributed architectures.
• Strong understanding of production debugging, system monitoring, performance optimisation and failure handling.
• Ability to independently identify potential system failures, design preventive solutions and troubleshoot complex production issues.
• Experience taking ownership of backend infrastructure from design and development through deployment and ongoing operations.

Good to Have:

• Experience building low-latency, high-throughput backend services.
• Knowledge of caching technologies, retrieval systems and indexing mechanisms.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging systems such as Kafka, NATS or equivalent.
• Exposure to machine learning infrastructure, including GPU scheduling, model serving, inference optimisation and batching.
• Experience building infrastructure or internal platforms that other engineering teams depend on.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containerisation and production deployment systems.

Ideal Candidate Profile:

• We are looking for an engineer who goes beyond writing backend code and has a strong understanding of how production systems behave under real-world conditions.
• The ideal candidate should be comfortable designing distributed architectures, managing databases and queues, debugging complex failures, optimising latency and taking complete ownership of mission-critical infrastructure.
• The key expectation is hands-on experience building and operating reliable, scalable distributed systems in production environments.

Skills

Databases, Distributed Systems, Go, Kafka, NATS, Python, Rust