Principal Distributed Systems Engineer

Review distributed-system designs and implementations for consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, performance, and production operability.

Analyze service boundaries, state management, messaging guarantees, database behavior, and failure recovery under realistic production conditions.

Identify race conditions, scaling bottlenecks, ambiguous invariants, unsafe retry behavior, and tradeoffs hidden by simplified explanations.

Provide reference architectures and code-review feedback that reflect staff- or principal-level engineering judgment.

Remote, project-based contract work. Scope and hours depend on project matching; the listed hourly range applies to matched work.

Requirements

• 10+ years building production backend or distributed systems
• Expertise in concurrency, databases, messaging, consensus tradeoffs, and reliability engineering
• Staff, principal, architect, or equivalent technical-leadership experience

Pay

$160–$240/hr

Alpheva is a new expert network (launched September 2026); payout methods are not published yet, so confirm your first payment before scaling up.