Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

fomo is seeking a hands-on Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own critical shared infrastructure such as datastores, caches, messaging systems, and regional application services. The role focuses on building predictable, high-throughput systems and improving observability, resilience, and data locality during failures and traffic surges.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate high-throughput, multi-region services.
• Improve datastore and cache performance, capacity, replication, and failure handling.
• Implement backpressure, concurrency limits, load shedding, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and bounded retries.
• Reduce cross-region latency and improve data locality.
• Design and test service, datastore, and regional failover procedures.
• Help architect new features to operate at scale from day one.
• Level up the team on how to think about scale.

Requirements

• 8 or more years of backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience designing and debugging distributed, high-throughput production systems.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including query performance, indexing, connection pooling, replication, transaction contention, and failure modes.
• Strong experience with Redis-compatible systems such as Redis, Valkey, Dragonfly, or KeyDB, including sharding, replication, memory management, hot keys, and failure handling.
• Experience operating services on AWS, ideally using ECS, RDS, and ElastiCache.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform.
• Proficiency in Go, TypeScript/Node.js, or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Hands-on experience designing and testing failover and disaster-recovery systems, including backup restoration, replication, regional failover, and RTO/RPO validation.
• Experience with NATS JetStream, Kafka, or another durable messaging system is a plus.
• Familiarity with Datadog APM and AWS Performance Insights is a plus.
• Experience performing live datastore or cache topology migrations is a plus.
• Experience operating systems with bursty or unpredictable traffic is a plus.
• Experience with financial, trading, cryptocurrency, gaming, or other high-throughput systems is a plus.