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Linux Distributed Systems Engineering Jobs
Distributed systems engineers design and build the infrastructure-level systems that power at-scale services: consensus protocols, distributed databases, message queues, distributed storage, and high-availability compute fabrics. This is one of the hardest engineering disciplines, demanding deep theoretical knowledge combined with practical systems programming on Linux. Roles are scarce, pay well, and are found at the companies operating at the largest scales.
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San Francisco, California, United States 2d ago $180k – $238k
Prague, Czech Republic May 27 Not disclosed
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Bengaluru, Karnataka, India May 22 Not disclosed
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Remote, India May 21 Not disclosed
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada May 21 Not disclosed
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Chantilly, Virginia, United States May 21 Not disclosed
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Sunnyvale, California, United States May 21 Not disclosed
Sunnyvale, California, United States May 21 Not disclosed
Frequently Asked Questions
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Distributed systems engineers work on the infrastructure layer: the systems that backend applications are built on top of. They solve problems of consensus (Raft, Paxos), fault tolerance, network partitions, eventual consistency, and high-throughput data flow. The CAP theorem, distributed transactions, and Byzantine fault tolerance are everyday concerns.
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Database systems (CockroachDB, TiDB, Cassandra), message queues (Kafka, Pulsar, NATS), distributed file systems (HDFS, Ceph), coordination services (ZooKeeper, etcd, Consul), consensus implementations, and the internal infrastructure of cloud providers (Chubby, Spanner-inspired systems).
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Strong systems programming in C++, Go, or Rust. Deep understanding of distributed algorithms, Linux networking and I/O, storage subsystems, and performance analysis. Experience with formal modelling (TLA+) is valued for correctness-critical systems. A strong algorithms and data structures foundation is assumed.
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Distributed systems engineers are among the highest-compensated software engineers. US salaries range from $160,000–$230,000 at senior level, with total compensation at top companies exceeding $300,000. The combination of theoretical depth and practical systems experience is genuinely rare.