Jobs in United States

Distributed Systems Engineer in United States

426 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current distributed systems engineer jobs across United States. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

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📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -84.7%

From $192K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform Client Data streams are mission-critical at Datadog, powering near real-time communication across the vast majority of our services. Our Streaming Platform group builds the core infrastructure and abstractions that ensure Datadog remains a trusted partner for engineers worldwide. See our blog post . The Streaming Platform Client team sits at the heart of this ecosystem. We own the Rust client library (producers and consumers) with language bindings for Java, Go, and Python. We focus on building intuitive APIs and abstractions that make a powerful distributed system easy to adopt and operate for the hundreds of internal users of our library. Our library runs on critical data paths that handle hundreds of millions of messages per second making performance, observability, and reliability paramount. We also develop and operate the service that bridges the clients fleet with the platform's control plane, handling complex balancing, scaling, and static stability challenges. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help us evolve these features. You will collaborate directly with our users, tackle performance-critical code, and solve complex distributed systems challenges across the control plane, client libraries, and data plane. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You’ll Do: Work within a distributed, high-impact team spanning Europe and the US, building critical technologies that power data pipelines for dozens of internal teams and hundreds of services. Architect and implement resilient interactions between our client libraries and the control plane. Optimize our high-throughput, low-level streaming library to push the boundaries of performance and efficiency. Champion the developer experience by pro

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team API Multimodal builds the developer-facing products and infrastructure that bring OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time model capabilities into the world. We are responsible for high-scale APIs for image generation, speech transcription, speech generation, and low-latency voice interactions. We partner closely with Research and Inference to bring frontier model capabilities to developers and use customer feedback to improve our models. About the Role As a software engineer on API Multimodal, you will build and operate the products and distributed systems behind OpenAI’s image, audio, and real-time APIs. You will work across model integration, API design, and production infrastructure to turn new research capabilities into reliable developer experiences. This hands-on role combines backend and systems depth with product judgment: you will own projects end to end, partner with Research, Inference, and Safety, and help make multimodal AI useful at scale. Model training experience is not required. In this role, you will: Design, build, and ship developer-facing APIs and backend services that serve frontier models. Architect low-latency streaming, request, session, and model integration systems that make complex multimodal interactions reliable and intuitive at scale. Work directly with Research to bring new model capabilities into production, shape the systems around them, and incorporate feedback from real-world developers and customers. Own the availability, latency, scalability, and cost efficiency of the services you build. Own projects from technical design and implementation through launch and ongoing iteration, while raising the team’s engineering standards. Your background might look something like: 7+ years of professional experience, excluding internships, in backend, infrastructure, platform, or product engineering roles. A track record of designing, building, and operating production backend services, developer-facing APIs, or distributed syste

TypeScriptPythonAWSRest
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Monetization team is a cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products, including next-generation ads experiences that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to build measurement systems that connect ad interactions to meaningful advertiser outcomes while protecting user privacy. In this foundational role, you’ll design infrastructure for conversion signals, attribution, reporting, and feedback loops across OpenAI’s ads products. This role is ideal for engineers who have built large-scale ads measurement, data, experimentation, marketplace, or distributed systems and want to apply that experience in a highly ambiguous 0→1 environment. You’ll work across event collection and normalization, deduplication and matching, attribution and modeled measurement, privacy-safe aggregation, reporting, and high-quality labels for ads optimization. We are hiring engineers who can independently own complex systems, make sound technical tradeoffs, and help define what should be built. You’ll work closely with Ads Delivery, Ads ML, Product, Research, Privacy, Data Sc

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

Join the engineering teams that bring OpenAI’s ideas safely to the world!! The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role We’re building the observability product for OpenAI—from scalable infrastructure to a rich, AI-powered UI. Our systems ingest over petabytes of logs and billions of time series metrics across our fleet. We're now layering intelligence on top—think agents that summarize SEVs, auto-generate dashboards, or help engineers debug through notebook-like UIs. We’re hiring software engineers across the stack—infra, backend, and product. You’ll join a small, gritty team building both foundational infra and novel internal tools to make OpenAI's production systems reliable, performant, and observable. What You’ll Do Own core observability infrastructure, including distributed logging, time series, and trace storage Build AI-native tools that help engineers detect, understand, and resolve issues autonomously. Contribute to UI experiences like dashboards, notebooking, or interactive debugging Collaborate closely with engineers, researchers, user ops, and other teams across the company to build the next generation observability product You Might Be a Fit If You: Have operated large-scale distributed systems in production. ( especially logging systems or some other time series databases) Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems. Have full-stack chops or product sensibilities—you're excited to build real tools people use. Have strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infra (Kubernetes, AWS, etc). Bonus : built or contributed to observability systems (e.g. Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc). Why This Team We’re b

AWSKubernetesRestAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time. Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution. About the Role You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production. You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust. In this role, you will: Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, dist

AWSKubernetesRestAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently. About the Role As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products. We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services. Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems. Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence). Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows. Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems. Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsesse

RedisAWSCI/CDRest
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Workload team is responsible for designing and running OpenAI’s LLM training and inference infrastructure that powers frontier models at massive scale. Our systems unify how researchers train and serve models, abstracting away the complexity of performance, parallelism, and execution across vast GPU/accelerator fleets. By providing this foundation, the Workload team ensures that researchers can focus on advancing model capabilities while we handle the scale, efficiency, and reliability required to bring those models to life. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to design and implement the dataset infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s next-generation training stack. You will be responsible for building standardized dataset interfaces, scaling pipelines across thousands of GPUs, and proactively testing performance bottlenecks. In this role, you will collaborate closely with the multimodal researchers, and other infra groups to ensure datasets are unified, efficient, and easy to consume. In this role, you will: Design and maintain standardized dataset APIs, including for multimodal (MM) data that cannot fit in memory. Build proactive testing and scale validation pipelines for dataset loading at GPU scale. Collaborate with teammates to integrate datasets seamlessly into training and inference pipelines, ensuring smooth adoption and a great user experience. Document and maintain dataset interfaces so they are discoverable, consistent, and easy for other teams to adopt. Establish safeguards and validation systems to ensure datasets remain reproducible and unchanged once standardized. Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in distributed dataset loading (e.g., straggler systems slowing global training). Provide visualization and inspection tools to surface errors, bugs, or bottlenecks in datasets. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong engineering fundamentals with experience in distributed systems, data pipelines, or infrastructure.

AWSRestAIRust
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Software Engineering team is responsible for designing and building the scalable, performant, and secure backend systems that power our products—from early prototypes to large-scale deployments. We collaborate closely with product, hardware, and full-stack teams to ensure our infrastructure enables fast iteration while setting a strong foundation for long-term growth. About the Role As a Backend Engineer , you will design and build services, APIs, and infrastructure that support evolving product needs. You’ll apply a deep understanding of backend systems and maintain enough end-to-end context—from hardware to cloud—to guide technical decisions that best serve the product and team. We’re looking for engineers who thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments and care deeply about building robust systems that scale. This role is based in San Francisco, CA . We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Architect, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend systems. Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs. Balance near-term development velocity with long-term maintainability and scalability. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive, end-to-end solutions. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems. Have a proven track record of building and scaling systems from early stage to large scale. Are proficient with Python and Go, and familiar with a range of server-side technologies. Have a strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices. Can reason about full-stack tradeoffs from hardware through cloud infrastructure. (Nice to have) Have experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures. (Nice to have) Bring a background in instrumentation, analytics, and performanc

PythonAWSRestAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role We’re looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help build the core infrastructure behind OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems. In this foundational role, you’ll architect and implement distributed systems that power OpenAI’s monetization stack—focusing on reliability, performance, privacy, and large-scale operation. You’ll work across backend, systems, and platform layers to define and implement 0→1 infrastructure, partnering closely with Product, Design, and Research to shape the future of monetized AI experiences. Your work will enable both internal and external teams to build on safe, scalable, and robust monetization primitives. This role is exclusively based across our San Francisco & Seattles sites. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Design and build the foundational backend and infrastructure powering OpenAI’s monetization and ads systems Architect large-scale distributed systems that

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Codex Core Agent team builds the kernel of Codex. We own making the agent better, accelerating research, and making those improvements real in production for our users. That means working across the systems that make Codex actually function as an agent in the real world: the production performance envelope around tokens, latency, reliability, cost, and capacity; the core execution loop and interfaces that turn models into useful behavior; the shared infrastructure that enables other teams to build on Codex; and the feedback loops that turn real-world usage into better models and better agent behavior over time. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to build the infrastructure that powers Codex agents in production. This role focuses on the systems that let models safely execute code, interact with tools, complete long-running tasks, and operate reliably and efficiently at scale. You’ll design and operate the infrastructure behind sandboxed execution, orchestration, stateful workflows, app-server and SDK boundaries, and model rollouts. You’ll work at the intersection of distributed systems, developer tooling, and AI, building primitives that make Codex faster, safer, more reliable, and easier for the rest of the organization to build on. What You’ll Do Design and build execution environments for AI agents, including sandboxing, isolation, and reproducibility. Develop systems for agent orchestration across multi-step, tool-using workflows. Build infrastructure for running, testing, and debugging code generated by models. Create state and memory systems that allow agents to persist context across long-running tasks. Optimize tokens, latency, reliability, and cost across Codex’s production fleet. Support model rollouts, capacity planning, and the core tradeoffs between quality, speed, and economics to manage a fleet of frontier agents at scale. Build shared platform capabilities that unblock product teams, partner teams, and open source Codex. Yo

AWSCI/CDRestAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches. About the Role In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs. In this role, you will Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates. Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure. Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput. Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference. You might thrive in this role if you: Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency. Are comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling. Have deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization. Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production systems. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve o

AWSRestAIRust
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📍 Menlo Park, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -92.9%

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. Snowflake’s Release Engineering team builds and operates the systems that safely deliver infrastructure, platform, and product changes to production at global scale. We own the release platforms, rollout orchestration, and safety mechanisms that allow engineering teams across Snowflake to ship quickly while minimizing operational risk. Our mission is to make production deployments fast, safe, self-service, increasingly autonomous, and augmented by AI-driven intelligence and automation. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, distributed systems reliability, and large-scale multi-cloud infrastructure orchestration. At Snowflake, Release Engineering is a platform engineering function focused on building the systems, abstractions, and automation that make software delivery safe, scalable, and efficient across the company. In this role, you will Design and build continuous deployment and rollout infrastructure that safely ships changes across Snowflake’s large-scale, multi-cloud production environment. Build and evolve platform capabilities for progressive delivery, including staged rollouts, canarying, automated health checks, rollback controls, and guardrails that reduce blast radius during production change events. Improve engineering velocity by removi

PythonJavaKubernetesCI/CD
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📍 Bellevue, Washington, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -92.9%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. Snowflake is now building a world class OLTP service on Postgres. We’re hiring Senior Postgres Engineers to help build the new Snowflake Postgres service. This is an exciting opportunity to help build a large scale, multi-cloud Postgres offering with access to an existing customer base. AS A SENIOR POSTGRES ENGINEER YOU WILL: Develop orchestration layer/ control-plane of large scale databases Work with AWS, Azure, and GCP APIs Build High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions Tune Postgres to operate at scale for some of the largest datasets in the world Secure and ensure customer data is protected Work alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry and help redefine the space by inventing at various layers of the software stack — from broad distributed systems to low-level optimizations that fundamentally change the performance characteristics of the system to cater to our customer needs. OUR IDEAL SENIOR POSTGRES ENGINEER WILL HAVE: 7+ years industry experience designing, building and developing large scale systems in production Experience building and maintaining distributed, highly available, fault tolerant services Excellent understanding of low level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking, storage, performance,

PythonJavaPostgreSQLAWS
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📍 Santa Clara, United States
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -8%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

NVIDIA is a global leader in high-speed computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning. Our team develops data engineering solutions that empower AI developers in autonomous vehicle (AV) domains to innovate quickly and effectively at scale. Are you ready to take on a senior technical role in building high-performance AI data pipelines? We seek an exceptional individual to design and optimize microservices and data pipelines to process massive volumes of AV data and enable seamless data mining and AI training. The ideal candidate will bring expertise in big data processing and distributed computing to create efficient solutions and overarching architectures for challenges such as video data curation, behavioral search, and AI dataset management. What you'll be doing: Scope and build tools, microservices, workflows, and distributed applications to accelerate data mining and AI training. Design and implement solutions for streaming, resilience, logging, security, authentication, workflow orchestration, and data management. Deploy AI models. Design and develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows enabling hybrid and agentic patterns. Analyze and operationalize complex distributed systems for speed-of-light performance. What we need to see: Experience developing high-performance, scalable software systems. MS with 6+ years, or BS (or equivalent experience) with 8+ years of relevant experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. Strong programming skills in Python or Golang Proficiency in key technologies like Kubernetes, Helm, Hive, Parquet, SQL, vector databases, e.g., Milvus. Strong architectural skills with a proactive, problem-solving mentality. Experience in data mi

PythonSQLKubernetesArtificial Intelligence
D
📍 Austin, Texas, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listing
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About DevRev At DevRev, we're building the future of work with Computer – your AI teammate. Unlike traditional tools, Computer unifies all your data sources, tools, and workflows into a single AI-ready platform, giving employees real-time insights, proactive suggestions, and powerful agentic actions. It extends your existing software with AI-native apps and agents that work alongside your teams and customers – updating workflows, coordinating across teams, and eliminating repetitive work. We call this Team Intelligence: human-AI collaboration that breaks down silos, brings people back together, and frees you to solve bigger problems. Backed by Khosla Ventures and Mayfield with $150M+ raised, DevRev is trusted by global companies across industries. About the role We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help build and evolve the data platform that powers critical business decisions and customer-facing experiences. You will own significant parts of our data architecture that is main powerhouse of DevRev Computer’s memory for accurate and efficient Answers. As a part of data team, you will design and operate scalable data systems, and work closely with Software Engineering, AI Agent teams, Data Science, and Product teams to turn complex data requirements into reliable, high-quality data products. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys solving challenging problems involving large-scale data, distributed systems, database architecture, and performance optimization. You will have significant technical ownership and the opportunity to influence the direction of our agentic data platform while helping raise the engineering bar across the team. Responsibilities Own data architecture for large-scale, high-impact projects, making thoughtful tradeoffs across scalability, reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational cost. Design, build, and operate scalable data pipelines and data systems that reliably ingest, transform, store, and serv

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