Distributed Systems Engineer – Platform

Systems Engineers at Inngest build the core of our product: the durable execution layer, queueing system, state stores, and the distributed systems that connect them together. It’s extremely fun, rewarding, and technical work that provides interesting challenges and deep gratification.

About us: Inngest is solving long standing developer problems in a novel way which means we’re creating first-of-it’s-kind solutions. We’re building tools that developers will use in their everyday workflow so efforts to improve UX and performance are primary. Importantly, you’ll need a strong product mindset and an interest in developer tools.

The role

To be able to build something that scales and functions well, a Systems Engineer needs to be both a generalist and a specialist. Along with our existing team, you’ll be responsible for the inner workings of our queueing system (eg. working on debounce, concurrency over time), state store (handling terabytes to petabytes of storage), the API layers in-between, and sometimes the high-level SDKs that our users build with.

Your work will directly impact millions of developers, and you’ll collaborate with our designers, engineers, and founders to build the best experience possible.

This role requires working time overlap with US PST. Ideally, you’d live in the SF Bay Area, but for strong candidates you may live anywhere in the United States. Our existing systems engineering team is in San Francisco and works in person several days a week.

What you’ll do

• Architect and implement solutions in our queueing layer, state store, and execution layer (eg. concurrency over time, or function debounce)

• Plan and implement improvements on throughput, and latency at hundreds of thousands to millions of requests per second

• Contribute to systems architecture and infrastructure changes as we grow

• Collaborate with team members to expose internal data across metrics stores, APIs, and customer dashboards we host in our cloud UI

• Work with backend engineers to design APIs that can be used across the Inngest cloud dashboard, dev server and CLIs

• Dogfood the Inngest product and develop ideas for improvements, features, or integrations

• Communicate with our users through Github, email and Discord

• Write technical specs for features and documentation for our users

Ideal candidate

• You’ve been working on distributed systems for several years

• You’ve used Go or similar statically typed languages professionally for two years or more

• You’ve architected, or been involved in designing, systems that handle scale

• You understand engineering trade-offs and can make correct judgement calls on approaches available

• You understand how to observe, monitor, and maintain the systems you design

• You appreciate simplicity, even if it’s harder to design and build

Bonus points

• Work with compliance (SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, etc.) and know how to make it serve security approaches and not the other way around

• Experienced or have a solid understanding of networking

• Understand and have experience managing and maintaining systems, eg. SRE roles

What your first 90 days will look like

• First week: you’ll learn how we work as a team and our approach to growth. You’ll also start to learn our system architecture and hopefully make a couple of small contributions to the dev server UI or our cloud dashboard.

• By day 30, you’ll be proficient with our weekly cadence of work and have contributed a new feature to our executor, state, queue, metrics, or some other component. You’ll fully understand our company, product, and growth strategy and start to build up context for your product mindset.

• By day 90, you’ll have shipped significant changes to our open source project and cloud platform. You also helped define the specs. You’ll have learned where you can contribute outside of the engineering domain (growth, UX design, DevRel, etc.) and contributed ideas around product and growth. We’re all aligned and mutually excited about how we work together now and in the future!

What we build with

• Backend: Go, Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, PubSub/Kafka, k8s

• APIs: gRPC internally, GraphQL and REST APIs for UI

• Hosted on AWS, GCP and Bare Metal

• Github, Linear, Slack, Notion, Figma