Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Software Engineer, Distributed Systems (Core)

Company: Hightouch
Location: Remote (United States or Canada)
Compensation: $180,000 - $320,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Visa transfers (can sponsor most visas)

About Hightouch

Hightouch pioneered the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP), which lets companies use their own data warehouse to collect, prepare and activate customer data for marketing personalization and business operations. Its AI Decisioning platform lets marketers set goals and guardrails that AI agents use to personalize 1:1 customer interactions. Hundreds of companies, including Autotrader, Calendly, Cars.com, Monday.com and PetSmart, rely on it.

Founded in 2018, Hightouch has about 350 people and has raised $320M+ through Series D.

The Role

Hightouch is hiring distributed systems engineers to work on the syncing engine that customers and other engineering teams rely on to move massive amounts of customer data. You will apply expertise in distributed systems, performance optimization and troubleshooting across a multi-cloud, multi-region infrastructure that serves a global customer base. Engineers get very high ownership: you deliver projects start to finish, work directly with customers on their hardest scaling problems and shape what the team works on.

What You Will Do

• Speed up syncs of large data volumes to destinations like Facebook and Snapchat by optimizing every part of the sync process.
• Extend batch syncing into real-time streaming syncs from sources such as webhooks and queues.
• Find and remove scaling and reliability bottlenecks and architect for the next order of magnitude of growth.
• Evolve the Personalization API, a low-latency caching layer over data warehouses serving sub-30ms p90 responses at millions of QPS.
• Extend the multi-region, multi-cloud backend to new regions to meet customer data-residency requirements.

What You Bring

• 7+ years as a software engineer with deep distributed systems work
• Staff-level scope with fast promotion history at high-growth startups (Series A to E)
• Very strong systems design fundamentals and understanding of how large-scale distributed systems behave
• Built event collection or data streaming services that power critical systems (message queues, Kafka, SQL databases, Kubernetes, Docker)
• Owned systems through orders-of-magnitude growth
• A pure backend focus (this is not a full-stack, data engineering or DevOps role)
• Excellent communication and fast learning

Nice to Have

• Built data sync engines moving terabytes per day
• Work close to the infrastructure layer; understands how tools like Spark, Flink and Kafka are built
• Degree from a top computer science program

Interview Process

Recruiter screen (30 min), hiring manager interview (30 min), system design screen (45 min), system design interview (90 min), final call.

Tech Stack

Distributed systems, Kafka, message queues, SQL databases, Kubernetes, Docker, multi-cloud

REVENUE: 14% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $25K-$45K; 10 seat(s) = up to $350K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (client (Stripe/Kong/Semgrep named) + suggested): Stripe, Kong, Semgrep, Confluent, Segment (Twilio), Fivetran, Databricks.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 7+ yrs; 0-to-1 backend distributed systems at high-growth startup; staff-level + fast promotions; streaming/data sync at scale; visa: transfers only; location: Remote US/Canada. Pure backend only (send full-stack to other role); avoid multiple <1yr tenures, data/devops engineers, big-tech-only SRE profiles; top-school signal preferred.