Distributed Systems Engineer - Cloud Platform

Distributed Systems Engineer | Cloud Platform | Go / Rust | Kubernetes
Location: Remote (US & Canada) with optional office access in San Francisco
We're partnering with a well-funded, venture-backed infrastructure startup that's building a next-generation cloud database platform. The company is developing a Postgres-native technology that enables organizations to unify transactional databases, full-text search, vector search, and analytics into a single platform-eliminating the complexity of managing multiple systems.
Already trusted by a growing number of enterprise customers, the business is entering an exciting growth phase and is looking for an experienced Distributed Systems Engineer to help build its managed cloud platform from the ground up.
The Opportunity
You'll join a small, high-calibre engineering team working on the company's cloud control plane, building the infrastructure that provisions, operates, and scales customer database clusters in production.
This is a hands-on engineering role focused on distributed systems, Kubernetes, automation, and cloud-native infrastructure. You'll have significant ownership over technical decisions and the opportunity to influence both product direction and architecture from an early stage.
What You'll Be Working On

• Designing and building a cloud-native control plane for a managed database platform
• Developing Kubernetes Operators and Controllers to provision, upgrade, scale, and maintain customer clusters
• Building automation around backups, replication, failover, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• Designing APIs and orchestration systems that manage stateful infrastructure
• Working closely with cloud-native database technologies and the wider Postgres ecosystem
• Improving deployment, testing, monitoring, and operational tooling
• Collaborating directly with customers to solve complex infrastructure challenges
• Helping shape product strategy, technical architecture, and engineering best practices

What We're Looking For
You'll likely have experience in several of the following:

• Building distributed systems or cloud infrastructure platforms
• Developing Kubernetes Operators, Controllers, CRDs, or other Kubernetes-native software
• Designing APIs, control planes, orchestration platforms, or infrastructure automation
• Production development experience in Go or Rust
• Operating reliable production workloads on Kubernetes
• Experience with infrastructure tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Bash, or Python

Nice-to-have experience includes:

• Database operators or Database-as-a-Service platforms
• Cloud-native Postgres technologies
• Search platforms, analytical databases, or high-performance data systems
• Open-source contributions
• Experience working in early-stage or high-growth startups

What Makes This Role Interesting

• Build a cloud platform from the ground up rather than maintaining legacy infrastructure
• Work on technically challenging distributed systems and Kubernetes internals
• Join a highly technical engineering team with significant autonomy
• Influence architecture and product direction from day one
• Work directly with customers solving real infrastructure problems
• Opportunity to contribute to open-source technologies

If you're passionate about distributed systems, Kubernetes, databases, and building developer infrastructure at scale, I'd be happy to tell you more about the company and the opportunity.