Backend | Distributed Systems Engineer

Restate

1d•$220,000 - $260,000•Remote

About The Position

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. 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. About Restate Restate (https://restate.dev/) is a lightweight runtime that turns services, workflows, and AI applications into durable processes. Developers adopt Restate so they can focus on business logic while Restate handles the challenges of building resilient, scalable applications—retries, state, communication, orchestration, and recovery. Restate itself is built as a low-latency durable execution runtime in Rust, designed for production scale with its own optimized storage engine. Developers can build Restate applications using TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, or Ruby. Today, Restate powers production workloads at Fortune 500 companies—including Tier 1 financial institutions—as well as fast-growing infrastructure and AI companies building mission-critical systems. Our team includes the creators of Apache Flink and engineers who built large-scale distributed systems at Meta. We care deeply about building infrastructure developers genuinely enjoy using, with thoughtful engineering and elegant systems. The Role As a Backend / Distributed Systems Engineer, you'll work across the systems that make Restate a reliable foundation for modern applications. You'll design and build backend infrastructure, distributed systems, and developer-facing capabilities that need to operate reliably at production scale. You'll work on problems involving distributed execution, state, storage, messaging, concurrency, fault tolerance, and recovery. This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll spend the majority of your time designing, building, testing, and improving software. You'll also have opportunities to work directly with engineers using Restate in production. Rather than sitting behind a product boundary, you'll see firsthand how teams are building with Restate, help solve challenging technical problems when needed, and bring those insights back into the product. As one of our early engineers, you'll have significant influence over both the technology and the engineering practices we build around it.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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
Build for production
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
Work closely with engineers using Restate
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
Shape the product and engineering culture
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