[Hiring] Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer @Restate

Role Description

Software is changing. Applications are becoming increasingly long-running, stateful, autonomous, and distributed. As systems grow more complex, engineers spend more and more time solving the same infrastructure problems: retries, failures, orchestration, state management, communication, and recovery. We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves. At Restate, we're building durable execution as a foundational infrastructure primitive—making reliability a default property of modern applications instead of an engineering burden.

We're looking for a Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer to help us build and evolve that infrastructure. You'll work on the core systems that make Restate fast, reliable, and scalable—from distributed execution and state management to storage, messaging, and production infrastructure. You'll have the opportunity to work closely with other engineers building real production systems, giving you a direct view into how the systems you build are used and where they can be improved.

If you enjoy distributed systems, backend infrastructure, and solving difficult engineering problems, we'd love to talk.

What You'll Do

• Build distributed systems infrastructure
• Design and implement core backend and distributed systems components
• Work on problems involving durable execution, state management, messaging, storage, concurrency, and fault tolerance
• Build systems that are low-latency, highly reliable, and capable of operating at significant scale
• Improve the performance, scalability, and resilience of the Restate runtime
• Contribute to the architecture and evolution of Restate's core platform
• Design systems that operate reliably in real-world production environments
• Diagnose and solve complex distributed systems and production issues
• Improve observability, testing, failure handling, and operational reliability
• Work across the boundary between application code and infrastructure when needed
• Partner with engineering teams building production systems with Restate
• Understand real-world technical challenges and translate them into product improvements
• Build reference implementations, integrations, and tooling where useful
• Bring feedback from production users directly into engineering and product decisions
• Turn recurring technical challenges into reusable systems, tooling, and documentation
• Contribute to technical discussions, design reviews, and architecture decisions
• Help define engineering practices as the team and product scale

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering experience building production systems
• Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or other systems involving concurrency, state, messaging, and failure handling
• Strong experience in at least one backend language; Rust, Go, Java, C++, or similar are particularly relevant
• Experience designing, building, and operating production software at scale
• Strong understanding of software reliability, performance, and system design

Requirements

• Experience with distributed databases, workflow engines, messaging systems, or other infrastructure software
• Experience with Rust or other systems programming languages
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure
• Experience with storage engines, networking, or low-level systems
• Experience rearchitecting or migrating production systems
• Open-source contributions or experience building developer-facing infrastructure

How You Work

• You enjoy solving difficult technical problems and digging deep into how systems work.
• You care about correctness, performance, reliability, and developer experience.
• You communicate technical ideas clearly through design docs, architecture discussions, and code.
• You have high ownership and thrive in an early-stage environment.
• You naturally look for ways to turn one-off solutions into reusable systems.
• You're comfortable working directly with other engineers to understand and solve real-world technical problems.

Why This Role

Most distributed systems engineers spend their careers improving existing infrastructure. At Restate, you'll have the opportunity to help define a new infrastructure primitive from the ground up. You'll work alongside the creators of Apache Flink and engineers who have built large-scale distributed systems, tackling some of the fundamental problems behind reliable modern applications. You'll have meaningful ownership over the systems you build, influence the architecture as Restate scales, and see your work running in production at companies building mission-critical applications. And because we're still early, you'll have an unusually direct connection between the engineers building with Restate, the problems they're encountering, and the software we build to solve them.

Location

United States — San Francisco Bay Area preferred