Staff or Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems

The Staff or Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems will own a major vertical of distributed infrastructure from design through production operations. The organization runs large-scale services executing millions of queries and processing hundreds of millions of tokens per minute across substantial structured and unstructured data volumes. A core challenge of this role is multi-tenant workload isolation, with customer workloads varying by three or more orders of magnitude in size and demand while sharing infrastructure. This is a hands-on production engineering role requiring direct ownership of system design, production code, infrastructure, deployment, observability, reliability, and incident response., Own a major vertical of distributed infrastructure from infrastructure definitions through production operations. Design and implement systems for workload isolation, admission control, fairness, and tail-latency management under multi-tenant contention. Write production code and directly investigate performance and reliability problems. Own infrastructure-as-code, deployment configuration, production promotion, and observability for the systems you build. Lead incident response for services within your ownership scope. Identify and remove bottlenecks across ingestion, storage, retrieval, orchestration, and AI-processing pipelines. Establish technical patterns and working implementations that raise the architectural quality of the broader engineering team., Are you a software development engineer who wants to build the systems that hundreds of thousands of AWS customers rely on to keep their cloud environments secure and compliant? Th…

• 1 day ago

Demonstrated experience building and operating high-volume, low-latency services on shared infrastructure. Hands-on distributed systems experience, including writing production code. Experience with multi-tenancy and workload isolation. Familiarity with admission control, queuing, scheduling, and backpressure mechanisms. Experience managing tail latency. Reliability engineering and failure recovery experience. Experience with large relational and/or NoSQL data stores. Experience owning production infrastructure and deployment automation. Nice to Have: Experience with AI/LLM pipelines or token-processing infrastructure. Track record of rearchitecting legacy or high-risk systems. Experience using AI tooling to accelerate implementation. Legal technology or document-processing domain familiarity.

Compensation: $160,000-$200,000 base salary. Additional Compensation: This role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus or other incentive compensation. Benefits: Benefits available to eligible employees or consultants may include medical, dental, and vision insurance, paid sick leave, retirement savings plans, and other employer sponsored programs. US citizens and those authorized to work in the US are encouraged to apply., The compensation range listed above represents the expected range for this position. Actual compensation may vary based on factors including experience, skills, internal equity, and geographic location. This role may also be eligible for bonus, commission, or other incentive compensation depending on the position and company policies. Benefits available to eligible employees or consultants may include medical, dental, and vision insurance, paid sick leave, retirement savings plans, paid time off, and other employer-sponsored programs.

Hansell Tierney is one of the premier staffing and recruiting companies in the Pacific Northwest. Launched in 2001, we are a woman-owned business that serves and staffs Northwest organizations by doing things the right way, not just the easiest way. Hansell Tierney partners with candidates and clients to match the best candidates with interesting local opportunities. We navigate every relationship with the highest level of discretion and service while holding ourselves accountable to our promises. Our business thrives on our deep understanding of the job market and our ability to skillfully tailor our recruitment process to meet our clients’ unique needs.