Staff Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Location: Remote — work from anywhere in the world. The role is listed in Lisbon, Portugal.

Company

hirify.global builds a platform for collecting clean, reliable web data and powering competitive intelligence, analytics, and AI pipelines.

What you will do

• Architect and advance the control plane, including service and schema registries, SLO enforcement, health-aware routing, CLI tooling, and automated canary releases.
• Design the context plane to aggregate operational signals and create automated feedback loops for repair and optimization.
• Maintain Java and Python client libraries, workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines used across product teams.
• Define gRPC and Protocol Buffer contracts, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution rules.
• Operate distributed infrastructure across Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka, ingress systems, billing pipelines, Valkey, and evolving database platforms.
• Lead architectural discussions, reliability initiatives, incident reviews, mentoring, and shared infrastructure on-call activities.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems and internal platforms or core libraries.
• Expertise in Java with reactive frameworks such as Vert.x or Netty, alongside strong Python proficiency.
• Deep experience with gRPC, Protobuf, schema evolution, and backward compatibility.
• Production expertise with Kubernetes at scale, Terraform, and Kafka-based event streaming.
• Experience designing telemetry feedback loops, materialized views, or feature stores that adapt system behavior.
• Strong technical writing, architectural leadership, reliability engineering, and async communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with Temporal, DBOS, or similar durable workflow platforms.
• MLOps experience involving model serving, performance monitoring, or drift detection.
• Knowledge of SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, Envoy, service meshes, or zero-trust networking.
• Experience building developer CLIs, SDKs, project generators, or large-scale web scraping systems.
• Open-source contributions in distributed systems or data extraction.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work with flexible hours and the freedom to work from anywhere in the world.
• Globally distributed, multicultural engineering community across 33 countries.
• Work on complex distributed-systems problems, open-source technologies, AI, and web data extraction.
• Conference attendance and opportunities to meet colleagues from around the world.
• High autonomy, organizational trust, and strong product ownership.