Distributed Systems Engineer (Cache)

Location: Hybrid in Atlanta, Austin, Champaign, Denver, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, or Washington, D.C.

Salary: $194,000–$266,000 estimated annual base salary in San Francisco; other ranges vary by location.

Company

hirify.global operates a global network that protects and accelerates Internet applications and powers millions of websites and Internet properties.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate the high-performance reverse proxy and caching data plane at the edge.
• Contribute to Pingora and production services, improving asynchronous I/O, connection handling, resource efficiency, and tail latency.
• Improve cache correctness and performance through placement, retention, admission, eviction, range-request handling, and data-resilience mechanisms.
• Build globally distributed purge and Tiered Cache systems that improve hit rates, reduce origin load, and select efficient cache paths.
• Deliver shared platform capabilities, customer-facing APIs, and cache rules for keys, TTLs, responses, purge behavior, and Workers access.
• Own features through design, implementation, testing, observability, staged rollout, production operations, on-call, incident response, and post-mortems.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production software systems.
• Strong proficiency in Rust, Go, C, or C++, with willingness to work in Rust.
• Strong understanding of HTTP semantics and TCP, TLS, and QUIC.
• Experience with secure, resilient, high-performance distributed systems, Linux, networking, concurrency, and performance analysis.
• Production ownership experience, including monitoring, debugging, on-call, incident response, metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and experiments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and willingness to use AI-assisted engineering tools while maintaining accountability for correctness, security, and design quality.

Nice to have

• Professional Rust experience or experience with high-performance asynchronous systems.
• Experience with caches, HTTP proxies, CDNs, distributed storage, or latency-sensitive data-plane services.
• Experience analyzing memory, disk I/O, resource contention, and tail latency in production.
• Experience building APIs or distributed control planes with event streaming, relational databases, or analytical data systems.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, open-source software, or multi-team engineering programs.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on systems serving a significant portion of Internet traffic.
• Participation in hirify.global’s equity plan.
• Opportunities to improve reliability, capacity, operational tooling, engineering standards, and team practices.
• Applicants reaching the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a hirify.global office or hub.