Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

The role

You will design, build, and operate distributed systems for Hedra's inference infrastructure. This includes building systems for scheduling, routing, and managing compute-intensive workloads.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate distributed systems that power Hedra's inference infrastructure.
• Build systems for scheduling, routing, and managing compute-intensive workloads across heterogeneous resources.
• Improve throughput, latency, reliability, and resource utilization across serving infrastructure.
• Design systems that remain predictable and resilient under load, partial failures, changing capacity, and unpredictable workloads.
• Own production systems end to end, including deployment, CI/CD, testing and validation, observability, monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and failure modes and drive solutions.
• Work across infrastructure, model serving, APIs, and developer-facing systems.
• Use modern agentic coding workflows to design, build, debug, and ship software.
• Help shape the technical direction of a small engineering organization.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building distributed backend or infrastructure systems.
• A track record of designing and operating high-availability production services at meaningful scale.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including experience reasoning about concurrency, queues, retries, failure recovery, consistency, backpressure, capacity, and system behavior under load.
• Experience debugging complex production systems across multiple layers of the stack.
• Strong judgment around architectural tradeoffs, particularly reliability, performance, complexity, and operational cost.
• Experience with CI/CD, comprehensive testing and validation strategies, monitoring, alerting, and production operations.
• Strong programming fundamentals and experience working in systems-oriented backend languages.
• Experience using agentic coding tools and workflows beyond basic prompting.
• Comfort operating in an environment where problems are often underspecified and engineers are expected to independently determine the right approach.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly and collaborate with engineers across infrastructure, research, and product.

Nice to have

• Experience with inference or model-serving infrastructure.
• GPU or accelerator infrastructure.
• Compute scheduling, orchestration, or resource management.
• High-throughput or low-latency systems.
• Kubernetes or other cluster orchestration systems.
• Performance optimization and profiling.
• Developer infrastructure, APIs, SDKs, or platform engineering.
• Experience operating infrastructure across cloud and/or bare-metal environments.
• Python experience

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity
• 401k
• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
• Lunch and snacks at the office

About the company

Hedra is a research and infrastructure lab advancing post-training and inference for multimodal and physical AI. The team works fully in person in San Francisco.