Staff Systems Engineer

About Us When the tech giants arrived, they promised boundless connectivity, endless data, and a digital utopia. Reality check: We're drowning in a sea of useless information. Enter bitdrift. We're here to rewrite the script, giving engineers the power to control the chaos and turn down the noise. We are on the hunt for an experienced Staff Systems Engineer to help us radically redefine how our customers, some of the largest companies in the world, store and visualize their mobile observability data. You'll work hand-in-hand with designers, mobile engineers, front-end engineers, and leadership to create user experiences that are not only intuitive and responsive but truly stand out, as well as the underlying architecture to emit, store and query massive scale observability data reliably. We're looking for someone passionate about systems engineering, infrastructure, reliability, and observability, who can take ownership of shaping the technology that makes bitdrift magical for end-users. This is your chance to make a significant impact and redefine what's possible! bitdrift exists to fundamentally reshape the mobile observability status quo—a critical piece of the observability picture that has been historically neglected. It is both extremely important (what good is a 99. 9% server success rate when the app is hard down from a bad JSON response? ) and notoriously hard. Throwing server best practices at mobile ("ingest everything! ") simply doesn’t work across hundreds of millions of devices due to skyrocketing costs, sporadic networking, and constant app suspensions. We take a fundamentally different approach. We couple a control plane with local storage provided by a sophisticated SDK. Telemetry is spooled locally to each device and only uploaded when finite state machines, running on the device, match specific conditions that are updated in real-time. As we like to say this provides 1000x the data when you need it, and none when you don’t. The systems that power this technology are both novel and extremely interesting and this is your opportunity to do something very different in the observability space.

bitdrift is a bit of an unusual startup in that we’ve been at this for a while. The bitdrift team used to work at Lyft, and over several years developed a comprehensive internal solution to the problems outlined above. It supported 50+ million devices at Lyft and was the kernel of what is known as bitdrift Capture today. We spun out as an independent company in 2023 with Lyft as our first marquee customer, and raised $15M from leading investors like Amplify Partners. We are a small team of kind and talented people. Join us as we navigate the murky waters of observability with renewed hope. What You're Responsible For - Develop scalable and maintainable systems, including server code, storage systems, networking layers, and core infrastructure. You will also have the opportunity to work on the core Rust code that runs within our mobile SDK. - Collaborate with design, product, and engineering to ensure our infrastructure and back-end systems can support rapid product iteration. - Architect and optimize for maximum speed, scalability, and responsiveness. - Implement reliability tools like internal observability and analytics to keep an eye on performance and user behavior. - Stay ahead of the curve by exploring new tech and tools that take our systems to the next level. - Help troubleshoot, document, and share your knowledge with the team. - Connect with customers to announce new features, solve issues, and keep them excited about what’s next. Who You Are - 8+ years of professional systems and/or reliability engineering experience. - Love working with Rust or are excited to learn and are proficient in another system language like C/C++. In this job 99% of the code you write will be Rust. - Passionate about best practices and making systems development cleaner, faster, and smarter.