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About the Role
What you’ll be doing
This is a true hands-on, production-facing distributed systems role:
Design and operate real distributed systems that run 24/7 for demanding customers.
Build new storage capabilities that don’t really exist elsewhere – not just wiring together off-the-shelf components.
Design interactions between services with atomicity, idempotency and correctness front-of-mind.
Deploy and evolve infrastructure across multiple clouds, and generalise patterns so they’re repeatable
Be part of the on-call rotation for a production system – when things break in the middle of the night, you’re one of the people who can actually fix it.
Work directly with customers, balancing messy, changing requirements with the need to keep the system robust and simple.
You’ll have real influence over both technical and product direction.
Requirements
Location: San Francisco – in-officeCompensation: Competitive salary (approx. $150k–$250k) + meaningful equity
What you’ll bring
You don’t need to tick every box, but you should recognise yourself in most of these:
3+ years building and operating distributed systems in production (they’re flexible on the exact number).
Ideally some startup experience – you’re comfortable with chaos, ambiguity and priorities that move fast.
You’ve handled production incidents: read metrics/logs under pressure, dug through multiple services, and restored things to health (yes, including the odd 3am page).
Solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals – consensus, scaling patterns, failure modes, and the API design traps that cause pain later.
Comfort thinking about performance: latency budgets, throughput bottlenecks, where time actually goes in a request path.
You care more about making customers successful than “winning the argument”, and you’ve resolved technical disagreements before without blowing things up.
Languages and tools are flexible – what matters is that you can own real distributed systems end-to-end.
What you get
Work on hard, interesting problems in distributed storage that actually stretch you.
Direct access to a founding team with deep storage and cloud experience (FAANG-/hyperscaler-level backgrounds, without naming names).
In-person, high-bandwidth collaboration in San Francisco – whiteboards, quick decisions, no endless layers of management.
Meaningful equity in something that, if it works, underpins a big chunk of how companies use cloud storage.
If you’re a distributed systems engineer who likes being close to production, wants real ownership, and doesn’t mind the occasional spicy on-call, this is the kind of role you don’t see often.
About the Company
Most storage work is incremental. This isn’t.
You’d be joining a tiny, engineering-led startup building a new kind of cloud storage system – taking cheap object storage and making it behave like a fast, reliable local filesystem. Think serious distributed systems problems: consistency, performance, durability, multi-cloud, weird failure modes.
You’re not a “ticket closer” here; you’re one of the core people shaping how the product works, how it scales, and how it feels to customers.