Software Engineer, Distributed Systems (Core)

Hightouch pioneered the Composable Customer Data Platform, enabling companies to use their own data warehouses to collect, prepare, and activate customer data. The company is hiring a distributed systems engineer to build and optimize the syncing engine, improve large-scale data movement and streaming capabilities, and extend its multi-region, multi-cloud infrastructure. The role involves owning projects end to end and solving complex scaling and reliability challenges with customers and engineering teams.

Responsibilities:

• Speed up syncs of large data volumes to destinations like Facebook and Snapchat by optimizing every part of the sync process
• Extend batch syncing into real-time streaming syncs from sources such as webhooks and queues
• Find and remove scaling and reliability bottlenecks and architect for the next order of magnitude of growth
• Evolve the Personalization API, a low-latency caching layer over data warehouses serving sub-30ms p90 responses at millions of QPS
• Extend the multi-region, multi-cloud backend to new regions to meet customer data-residency requirements

Requirements:

• 7+ years as a software engineer with deep distributed systems work
• Staff-level scope with fast promotion history at high-growth startups (Series A to E)
• Very strong systems design fundamentals and understanding of how large-scale distributed systems behave
• Built event collection or data streaming services that power critical systems (message queues, Kafka, SQL databases, Kubernetes, Docker)
• Owned systems through orders-of-magnitude growth
• A pure backend focus (this is not a full-stack, data engineering or DevOps role)
• Excellent communication and fast learning
• Built data sync engines moving terabytes per day
• Work close to the infrastructure layer; understands how tools like Spark, Flink and Kafka are built
• Degree from a top computer science program