Distributed Systems Engineer
Relace
San Francisco, CA · Posted October 21, 2026
Just laid off? Start here: a plan for the first weeks
More in California job market · Technology & Software · Engineering jobs
More roles at Relace
- GPU Kernel Engineer · San Francisco, CA
Similar jobs
- Performance Engineer · Astera Labs · San Jose, CA
- Fluid Systems Engineer · Electric Hydrogen · San Jose, CA
- Senior Project Engineer – Solar & BESS · Heirloom · Brisbane, CA
- CoDesign & NextGen Performance Engineer · Cerebras Systems · Sunnyvale, CA
- Fluid Systems Engineer I · Rocket Lab · Long Beach, CA
- Senior Fluid Systems Engineer · Relativity Space · Long Beach, CA
Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast35% · of 54
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
How AI is used in this kind of work
AI use among engineers, all other is little observed so far. Measured exposure for engineers, all other: 7% (little observed).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
Say which you have and which you want to build. We use it to match you to jobs like this one.
About the job
About Relace
Relace is building a globally distributed inference cloud. Customers send us requests, we run them on our own GPU fleet around the world, and we compete on price, speed and reliability against companies far larger than us. We have customers and revenue today, we’re venture backed, and the team is still small, so you’ll own whole systems, not slices of them.
We build our own stack, and the fleet runs on Kubernetes across multiple clouds. Performance is the business: ten percent faster is ten percent more revenue. If you like making things fast, this is about as direct as it gets. You can trace a change you shipped this week to what it earned.
Some numbers: we process 800B+ tokens a day, we’ve grown 3x in the last three months, we’re one of the top providers by volume on OpenRouter, and we raised a $23M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Matrix Partners and Y Combinator.
The role
You would work on how the globally distributed inference runs: the routing layer deciding which machine handles a request, what happens when more work arrives than we have capacity for, and how the fleet grows and shrinks across clouds as demand moves. A lot of it is our own Rust service and the Kubernetes services that manage a multi-cloud fleet.
What we need to see
- Around five or more years building real production systems where latency and failure behaviour mattered: serving systems, control planes, schedulers, databases, networking, trading systems. Not data pipelines or analytics.
- A systems language you know well. Rust, C++ or Go is good.
- Real ownership of something that ran under load, and the ability to talk through a production failure you debugged yourself, in detail.
- Kubernetes at the level of someone who has extended it, particularly on low-reliability infrastructure.
Nice to have
Experience with a scheduler or load balancer as a real project rather than a side task; work with spot or preemptible capacity; any exposure to AI serving systems, which is genuinely optional. We can teach you our domain, but we can’t teach distributed systems instincts.
Working here
San Francisco, in person, five days a week, because the hard problems get solved at a whiteboard. This is a senior role, with competitive compensation plus equity.