Distinguished Engineer

The role

You will set the multi-year technical vision for the platform — and prove it works by building it. This is not a strategy-only role. You perform competency analysis across the architecture, build working prototypes to validate direction, write production code, and lead cross-functional delivery. You are accountable to stakeholders for the quality and viability of what ships. You work hand-in-hand with Product to ensure the technical vision maps to customer value.

What you'll work on

• Distributed control plane spanning cloud services and on-prem edge appliances connected via mTLS gRPC streams
• Observability and telemetry at scale: OpenTelemetry collection pipelines, stream processing (Kafka), time-series storage (ClickHouse/VictoriaMetrics), real-time fabric state views, packet-event analysis, and fleet-wide health aggregation
• Agentic AI operations: design and build autonomous infrastructure agents that evaluate prerequisites, orchestrate multi-step workflows (onboarding, upgrades, drift remediation), handle failure recovery, and interact with the control plane through tool-use patterns (LangGraph, MCP)
• Fleet orchestration: aggregate health/compliance/drift APIs, cross-site campaign execution, template promotion workflows, parallel site onboarding
• Data architecture across Postgres, ArangoDB, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka, and Git-backed content stores
• Multi-tenant SaaS with site-scoped RBAC, session lifecycle, and enterprise IdP integration
• Device lifecycle management: zero-touch provisioning, enrollment protocols, config push via edge relay, drift detection and remediation
• Intent compilation engine: workspace management, merge request lifecycle, change request execution with gate-based verification and rollback

• 18–20+ years building and operating distributed systems serving enterprise customers across cloud and on-prem environments
• Deep proficiency in Go (or comparable systems language) with strong distributed systems fundamentals
• Significant experience designing observability and telemetry platforms: collection agents, stream processing, time-series databases, alerting pipelines, and real-time dashboards at scale
• Production experience with microservices architecture: gRPC, Protocol Buffers, spec-first REST APIs (OpenAPI)
• Hands-on with multiple storage paradigms: relational, graph, time-series, key-value, and streaming
• Track record building multi-tenant platforms with tenant isolation, RBAC, and identity federation
• Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and hybrid cloud/on-prem deployment models
• Strong API design sense: versioning, backward compatibility, contract-first development
• Proven ability to evaluate technical landscape, identify gaps through competency analysis, and validate solutions with working prototypes before committing the organization
• Track record of making high-stakes build-vs-integrate decisions that proved right under production pressure
• Ability to communicate architectural decisions clearly through writing and diagrams to engineering, product, and executive audiences

• Cross-functional by default — you work hand-in-hand with Product to shape strategy, with Customer Engineering to understand deployment reality, and across every engineering team to drive alignment
• Solution-oriented — when the path is unclear, you build a POC and prove it. Vision without working code is just an opinion.
• Accountable for delivery — you own the quality and viability of what ships to stakeholders. The buck stops with you on the hardest technical problems.
• Hands-on always — you write code, build prototypes, review critical PRs, and stay deep enough in the system to make sound architectural calls

 

Nice to have

• AI/ML agent architectures for infrastructure operations: LangGraph, AutoGen, MCP tool-use, human-in-the-loop gating, and autonomous workflow orchestration
• Network automation or infrastructure management platforms
• Datacenter networking experience: OpenConfig, gNMI, or fabric management at scale
• Hub-and-spoke / edge computing / control-plane-data-plane separation architectures
• OpenTelemetry contributor experience or deep familiarity with the collector ecosystem
• Device enrollment or zero-touch provisioning systems
• Open-source contributions or published work in distributed systems