Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New York.

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and scale distributed systems utilizing Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot, while preparing for traffic spikes and concurrency challenges of a live real-money trading platform.

• Take ownership of the development and enhancement of high-throughput event pipelines using Kafka, focusing on partition strategies, consumer group architecture, and ensuring exactly-once processing guarantees.

• Construct and optimize low-latency data layers with Postgres, Redis, and Redis PubSub — maintaining data integrity, cache coherence, and achieving sub-millisecond read times during peak demand.

• Apply and uphold resilience patterns across services — including backpressure management, circuit breaking, idempotent retry mechanisms, and graceful degradation during failure scenarios.

• Engage in the development of real-time user-facing systems, tackling the fan-out challenge for live market updates across tens of thousands of concurrent sessions.

• Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to synchronize technical execution with business objectives — contributing to decisions regarding build vs. buy and shaping long-term platform strategy.

• Establish and maintain engineering standards for observability, schema evolution, testing methodologies, and deployment practices throughout the team — facilitated through code reviews, RFCs, and technical documentation.

• Mentor and actively cultivate junior and mid-level engineers, enhancing the technical capabilities of the team through collaborative work, design reviews, and direct feedback.

⛳️ Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering with a primary emphasis on distributed systems and high-concurrency production environments.

• Expert-level knowledge in Java or Kotlin and Spring Boot, complemented by a solid understanding of modern API design — including REST, gRPC, and Protobuf.

• Extensive hands-on experience with Kafka (or Redpanda/Pub Sub) — encompassing internal mechanics, partition strategies, consumer group rebalancing, and delivery guarantees.

• Proven capability to identify and resolve bottlenecks in asynchronous messaging systems and apply patterns such as idempotency, distributed caching, and exactly-once processing.

• Practical experience with Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and cloud-native infrastructure within AWS.

• Strong instincts for production reliability — experience being on-call, triaging distributed system failures under pressure, and delivering durable solutions.

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and guide engineers through intricate architectural decisions without direct authority.

• History of defining success metrics from the outset — including SLAs, latency budgets, and throughput targets — and ensuring systems are held accountable to these metrics in production.

🏝️ Benefits

• For information about our benefits, please visit https://benefitsatfanatics.com/.