Engineering Manager - Distributed Systems

Location: Remote, Europe Time Zone Start Date: ASAP Employment Type: Full-Time Team: Core Compute & Distributed Systems Language: English About The Role We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead a team building the distributed systems that power a decentralized compute and storage platform. You will lead a team of senior engineers working on P2P networking, distributed storage, compute orchestration, and core platform services. You’ll combine people leadership with strong technical ownership, helping shape architecture, guide execution, and stay hands-on with critical systems and production code. This is a great opportunity for a technical engineering leader who enjoys working close to complex distributed systems, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building a strong engineering culture in an async, writing-first environment. What You’ll Do Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of distributed systems and backend engineersDrive the technical direction and execution of core P2P, compute, and distributed platform systemsStay hands-on with architecture, design, implementation, and technical problem-solvingGuide the development of high-throughput distributed protocols, including peer discovery, communication, replication, and data distributionOversee systems responsible for compute orchestration, provisioning, scaling, and workload distributionChampion reliability, resilience, observability, and production readiness across the platformEstablish strong engineering practices around testing, CI/CD, releases, incident response, and root-cause analysisWork closely with Infrastructure, Product, Security, and Platform teams on roadmaps, priorities, and cross-team dependenciesRun effective 1:1s, retrospectives, performance reviews, and career development conversationsTranslate technical and business priorities into clear execution plans and measurable outcomesFoster a culture of ownership, technical excellence, pragmatic decision-making, and continuous improvement What We’re Looking For 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in an Engineering Manager or technical leadership roleProven experience leading teams building and shipping distributed systems or infrastructure software to productionStrong understanding of P2P and distributed systems, such as peer discovery, DHTs, gossip protocols, NAT traversal, replication, consensus, or content-addressed systemsStrong backend and systems programming experience, ideally with Go, or alternatively C/C++ or RustSolid understanding of concurrency, networking, distributed communication, and fault-tolerant system designExperience with compute orchestration, distributed storage, distributed databases, or platform infrastructureFamiliarity with technologies such as libp2p, gRPC, Protobuf, IPFS/CIDs, Kubernetes, or containerized infrastructureExperience with observability and production operations, including tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or distributed tracingStrong understanding of Linux systems and networking fundamentalsExperience establishing engineering standards around automated testing, CI/CD, release processes, and incident managementStrong technical judgment and the ability to balance hands-on engineering, people leadership, and strategic decision-makingExcellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively in a remote and async environment Nice to Have Experience with distributed storage, object storage, distributed filesystems, or data integrity systemsKnowledge of S3 APIs, NFS, FUSE, POSIX semantics, block storage, or storage enginesExperience with erasure coding, sharding, garbage collection, or large-scale data migrationExperience managing multi-cloud, bare-metal, or geographically distributed infrastructureFamiliarity with GPU infrastructure, distributed AI compute, model serving, or inference routingExperience with infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform, Pulumi, or similar toolsExperience working with decentralized, blockchain, Web3, or other P2P architectures Why This Role Matters Shape a distributed platform from the core: Influence the architecture of the systems that power decentralized compute and storageLead a strong technical team: Mentor senior engineers and build an environment where engineers can do their best workStay hands-on: Continue solving complex technical problems while growing as an engineering leaderWork on genuinely distributed infrastructure: Tackle challenges around networking, replication, resilience, data distribution, and compute at scaleInfluence architecture: Make meaningful technical decisions rather than simply managing deliveryWork across the platform: Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, Product, and Backend teamsRemote-first and async: Work remotely with strong European time-zone overlap in a writing-first engineering culture How We Work We favor clear written communication, focused deep work, and pragmatic engineering over unnecessary meetings and synchronization. Our engineering culture emphasizes: RFCs and well-documented technical decisionsHigh automated test coverage and rigorous production validationPragmatic, maintainable codeStrong observability and operational ownershipRegular production releasesContinuous improvement through retrospectives and post-incident reviews Pragmatike is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants without discrimination or harassment based on race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to a fair and inclusive hiring process. We process your personal data solely for recruitment purposes, in accordance with applicable privacy laws, and maintain reasonable safeguards to protect your information. Your data may be shared with our client(s) for hiring consideration, but will not be disclosed to third parties outside of the recruitment process.