Staff Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Job Description :

We are looking for a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer Distributed Systems to lead the design and development of large-scale, mission-critical backend platforms.

The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in building distributed systems, event-driven architectures, microservices, and cloud-native applications capable of handling high transaction volumes with low latency and high availability.

As a Staff Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, drive architectural decisions, establish engineering best practices, and mentor senior developers while remaining hands-on with system design and development.

Key Responsibilities :

- Design and develop highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems capable of handling millions of transactions and requests.

- Architect low-latency, high-throughput backend services using modern microservices principles.

- Lead architecture reviews and define technology roadmaps aligned with business objectives.

- Design event-driven systems using messaging and streaming platforms.

- Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks, and architectural patterns for scalability and maintainability.

- Ensure systems meet requirements for availability, reliability, security, and performance.

- Develop robust backend services using Java and Spring Boot frameworks.

- Build and maintain RESTful APIs and asynchronous communication services.

- Implement domain-driven design (DDD) and distributed system design principles.

- Create reusable frameworks, libraries, and platform components.

- Optimize application performance through profiling, tuning, and architectural improvements.

- Design and implement event streaming solutions using Kafka.

- Develop caching strategies using Redis to improve application responsiveness.

- Design scalable NoSQL data models using Cassandra.

- Implement search and analytics capabilities using Elasticsearch.

- Handle distributed transactions, eventual consistency, and fault tolerance mechanisms.

- Design data replication, partitioning, and sharding strategies.

- Build and deploy cloud-native applications on Kubernetes.

- Design containerized solutions with scalability and resilience in mind.

- Implement observability practices including logging, monitoring, and tracing.

- Improve deployment automation and operational excellence.

- Drive platform reliability and disaster recovery planning.

- Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams.

- Mentor senior engineers and help elevate engineering standards.

- Conduct design reviews, code reviews, and technical discussions.

- Collaborate with Product Managers, Architects, DevOps, and Engineering Leadership.

- Participate in hiring and technical evaluations of engineering talent.

- Identify system bottlenecks and drive performance optimization initiatives.

- Implement resiliency patterns such as circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads, and rate limiting.

- Improve system observability through metrics, monitoring, and alerting.

- Lead root cause analysis and incident resolution activities.

- Define and track system SLAs, SLOs, and reliability metrics.

Required Technical Skills :

1. Programming & Frameworks :

- Strong expertise in Java (Java 8/11/17+)

- Extensive experience with Spring Boot

- Experience with Spring Ecosystem :

i. Spring MVC

ii. Spring Data

iii. Spring Security

iv. Spring Cloud

v. Spring WebFlux

2. Backend Architecture :

- Microservices Architecture

- Event-Driven Architecture

- Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

- Distributed System Design

- REST APIs

- API Gateway Patterns

- Service Discovery

- Circuit Breaker Patterns

3. Messaging & Streaming :

- Apache Kafka

- Kafka Streams

- Event Processing

- Message Queues

- Pub/Sub Architectures

4. Databases & Storage :

- Cassandra

- Redis

- Elasticsearch

- SQL Databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL preferred)

- Data Modeling

- Query Optimization

5. Cloud & Containerization :

- Kubernetes

- Docker

- Cloud Platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

- Helm

- Container Orchestration

- Service Mesh Concepts

6. Observability & Reliability :

- Prometheus

- Grafana

- ELK Stack

- OpenTelemetry

- Distributed Tracing

- Monitoring & Alerting

7. DevOps & CI/CD :

- Git

- Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab CI

- Infrastructure as Code concepts

- Automated Testing Frameworks

- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

- 915 years of experience in software engineering with significant experience in distributed systems.

- Proven experience building and operating large-scale, high-availability backend platforms.

- Strong understanding of distributed computing concepts including CAP theorem, consistency models, consensus, and fault tolerance.

- Experience designing systems that handle high concurrency and massive scale.

- Strong problem-solving, analytical, and debugging skills.

- Excellent communication and stakeholder management abilities.

- Experience working with internet-scale applications.

- Exposure to cloud-native architectures and platform engineering.

- Knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio.

- Experience with stream processing and real-time analytics platforms.

- Understanding of security best practices in distributed systems.

- Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.

- Experience leading engineering teams or serving as a technical architect.

(ref:hirist.tech)