Backend | Distributed Systems Engineer

Restate·Senior·Remote · San Francisco Bay Area·$220k–$260k USD

Posted Sep 26, 2026·restate.dev

Back to jobs

Backend | Distributed Systems Engineer

Restate·Senior·Remote · San Francisco Bay Area·$220k–$260k USD

Posted Sep 26, 2026·restate.dev

Back to jobs

Backend | Distributed Systems Engineer

Restate·Senior·Remote · San Francisco Bay Area·$220k–$260k USD

Posted Sep 26, 2026·restate.dev

Back to jobs

Backend | Distributed Systems Engineer

Restate·Senior·Remote · San Francisco Bay Area·$220k–$260k USD

Posted Sep 26, 2026·restate.dev

Overview

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.

We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves.

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.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for strong backend engineers who are excited by distributed systems and infrastructure and want to work on hard technical problems.

Must Have:

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 Have:

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

How You Work

You enjoy solving difficult technical problems and digging deep into how systems work.
You care about correctness, performance, reliability, and developer experience.
You communicate technical ideas clearly through design docs, architecture discussions, and code.
You have high ownership and thrive in an early-stage environment.
You naturally look for ways to turn one-off solutions into reusable systems.
You're comfortable working directly with other engineers to understand and solve real-world technical problems.

Overview

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.

We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves.

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.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for strong backend engineers who are excited by distributed systems and infrastructure and want to work on hard technical problems.

Must Have:

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 Have:

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

How You Work

You enjoy solving difficult technical problems and digging deep into how systems work.
You care about correctness, performance, reliability, and developer experience.
You communicate technical ideas clearly through design docs, architecture discussions, and code.
You have high ownership and thrive in an early-stage environment.
You naturally look for ways to turn one-off solutions into reusable systems.
You're comfortable working directly with other engineers to understand and solve real-world technical problems.

Apply

Overview

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.

We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves.

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.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for strong backend engineers who are excited by distributed systems and infrastructure and want to work on hard technical problems.

Must Have:

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 Have:

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

How You Work

You enjoy solving difficult technical problems and digging deep into how systems work.
You care about correctness, performance, reliability, and developer experience.
You communicate technical ideas clearly through design docs, architecture discussions, and code.
You have high ownership and thrive in an early-stage environment.
You naturally look for ways to turn one-off solutions into reusable systems.
You're comfortable working directly with other engineers to understand and solve real-world technical problems.

Overview

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.

We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves.

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.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for strong backend engineers who are excited by distributed systems and infrastructure and want to work on hard technical problems.

Must Have:

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 Have:

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

How You Work

You enjoy solving difficult technical problems and digging deep into how systems work.
You care about correctness, performance, reliability, and developer experience.
You communicate technical ideas clearly through design docs, architecture discussions, and code.
You have high ownership and thrive in an early-stage environment.
You naturally look for ways to turn one-off solutions into reusable systems.
You're comfortable working directly with other engineers to understand and solve real-world technical problems.

Apply

Browse

All Rust jobs

Senior Embedded Software Engineers

Rust Engineer

Staff Software Engineer - Server Networking Security

Senior Software Developer

Senior Rust Software Engineer - Banking Platform

Front Office Developer

Lead Rust Software Engineer

Senior Rust Engineer

Data Infrastructure Engineer - High Performance Computing

Rust Engineer

Lead Systems Engineer - AI Platform

Rust Engineer

Senior Product Engineer

Staff Embedded Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Overview

About Restate

The Role

What You'll Do

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

Nice to Have:

How You Work

Overview

About Restate

The Role

What You'll Do

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

Nice to Have:

How You Work

Overview

About Restate

The Role

What You'll Do

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

Nice to Have:

How You Work

Overview

About Restate

The Role

What You'll Do

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

Nice to Have:

How You Work

Senior Embedded Software Engineers

Rust Engineer

Staff Software Engineer - Server Networking Security

Senior Software Developer

Senior Rust Software Engineer - Banking Platform

Front Office Developer

Lead Rust Software Engineer

Senior Rust Engineer

Data Infrastructure Engineer - High Performance Computing

Rust Engineer

Lead Systems Engineer - AI Platform

Rust Engineer

Senior Product Engineer

Staff Embedded Engineer

Senior Software Engineer