Principal Distributed Systems Engineer (Quantum Computing)

Location: Onsite at the hirify.global office in Santa Clara, California, United States. Travel up to 15%, domestic or international. Candidates must meet U.S. export-control and government-contract eligibility requirements.

Base salary: $212,000–$265,000 USD annually, plus bonus, equity, and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops integrated quantum computing, networking, sensing, and security solutions for customers across industries including drug discovery, materials science, finance, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense.

What you will do

• Define the multi-year architecture and technical roadmap for the platform's distributed backend.
• Architect high-throughput ingestion, telemetry, event-streaming, time-series storage, and API systems.
• Build production services, prototypes, and reference implementations in Go, Rust, or another production systems language.
• Establish observability, reliability, security, multi-tenant isolation, access-control, and data-governance patterns.
• Set the multi-cloud architecture for Kubernetes workloads and Terraform infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Lead architecture governance, incident-response improvements, cross-team initiatives, and mentorship for senior engineers.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Hands-on architecture experience defining roadmaps and delivering distributed platforms to production.
• Deep experience with event streaming, high-throughput ingestion, time-series or large-scale data stores, consistency models, backpressure, idempotency, and processing semantics.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, Java, Scala, or another production systems language, plus cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, security, and cost optimization.
• Experience with multi-tenant platforms, data isolation, observability, reliability frameworks, SLOs, and technical leadership across multiple teams.
• U.S. citizenship or nationality, U.S. permanent residency, refugee status, or asylee status may be required for export-controlled technology and government-contract work.

Nice to have

• Production experience in Go or Rust.
• Network telemetry and management experience with gNMI/gRPC, NETCONF, SNMP, or YANG.
• Graph databases or graph data models for network topology.
• AI/ML platform infrastructure, MLOps, LLMOps, model governance, or agentic workflows.
• Experience in regulated security-conscious environments or contributions to infrastructure, streaming, observability, or networking projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-functional work on quantum computing, networking, and security platforms.
• Culture focused on autonomy, productivity, respect, equity, and inclusion.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with matching 401(k).
• Unlimited paid time off, paid holidays, parental and adoption leave, legal insurance, and a home technology stipend.