Member of Technical Staff - Distributed Systems Engineer

About the role

Build and operate the core shared services that power our research, training, and production environments. These systems form the foundational platform that multiple teams depend on for model development, deployment, and evaluation, unifying data, compute, and workflow management across the stack while enabling rapid experimentation and reliable production systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and uphold reliability targets through SLIs, SLOs, and healthy on-call practices.
• Maintain strong operational readiness with runbooks, incident playbooks, and capacity planning.
• Ensure correctness and performance under load, addressing consistency, tail latency, and failure modes.
• Develop APIs, SDKs, and internal platforms that enable high-velocity experimentation and iteration.
• Reduce operational burden through better tooling, standardization, and platform patterns that scale across teams.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering background with experience shipping production-grade systems.
• Experience designing APIs, services, or developer platforms that handle large-scale data or compute.
• Comfortable navigating complex codebases, debugging hard problems, and optimizing for reliability and speed.
• Thriving in a high-agency, fast-paced startup environment; bias toward action and impact.
• Excited about zero to one challenges, building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
• Collaborative, clear communicator, and comfortable working across research and infra boundaries.
• Motivated by creating the software backbone for the world’s most capable open-weight AI systems.

Qualifications

• Experience with container abstractions such as containers-as-a-service, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Knowledge of distributed systems architecture including sharding, replication, coordination services, and high-concurrency systems.
• Proficiency in service development stacks like gRPC, Protobuf, Go, and Rust.
• Understanding of reliability and performance concepts including idempotency, retries, backpressure, SLI/SLO design, and tail latency optimization.

Skills

• Software engineering skills.
• API and service design.
• Large-scale data and compute handling.
• Complex codebase navigation and debugging.
• Reliability and performance optimization.
• Container and distributed systems knowledge.

Benefits

• Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain our talent globally.
• Stock options: Everyone who joins and contributes to Reflection's success gets to share in the upside through stock options.
• Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life, with an annual wellness allowance.
• Meals: Lunch and dinner are provided in the office daily.
• Life & family: 22 weeks paid parental leave for all new birthing and non-birthing parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys.
• Vacation days: Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 days in the U.K.
• Sponsorship support: We sponsor visas to help exceptional talent join our team and support long-term immigration pathways where applicable.
• Team building: We have regular off-sites, happy hours, and team celebrations.

Pay

Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain our talent globally.

Schedule

Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 days in the U.K.