Distributed Systems Engineer

About Revel
Revel is the software platform for hardware test and control. Aerospace, defense, robotics, and energy teams use Revel to build control diagrams, stream telemetry, and operate the hardware they develop.

Location
Los Angeles or San Francisco, CA

The Role
We’re building a new data platform to add to Revel's current products. The data platform receives, stores, and serves telemetry from our customers' hardware. It helps customers develop and operate their hardware faster and more effectively.

You’ll join the founding team, which has fewer than six engineers. You will be responsible for core parts of the data platform: ingest, processing, indexing, encoding, compression, storage, and query of multi-modal telemetry. You will work on problems at all levels of the system. You design, build, and release your work, and you help operate it.

Problems you will work on

• One system in many environments. The data platform runs in commercial cloud, in government cloud, and on-prem at customer sites. It must be easy to install and operate in each environment.

• Powerful analysis in the browser. Users analyze telemetry directly in the browser. For example, they zoom from a full test to single samples, compare many test runs, and calculate new channels from existing data. These workflows send complex requests to the back end. The back end must supply query primitives that are flexible, composable, and fast.

• Speed at large scale. The data platform must hold petabytes of data and millions of unique series. At this scale and beyond, users must still get their data without delay.

• Many customers. Each customer's data must stay isolated from other customers. The data platform must use each machine efficiently, on our hardware and on customer hardware.

• Reliability. Disks fail, nodes stop, and networks partition. The data platform must continue to work, and users must not feel these failures.

What you will do:

• Build and operate services for ingest, storage, and query.

• Design and implement APIs based on programmatic and human user workflows.

• Design how the data platform divides work, scales horizontally, and continues to work during failures.

• Release your work to customers in all environments, and iterate on it based on learnings.

• Use the data platform to monitor itself.

Who we are looking for
We hire at all experience levels. We care more about what you have built than about how many years you have worked. We set the scope of your work to match your experience.

Show us at least one of these:

• You worked on the internals of a streaming, storage, or database system, not only on applications that use one. This work can come from a job, research, a course, or open source.

• You helped a system grow to a much larger scale, and you know what broke.

• You went deep on a passion project on your own time to realize an idea and learned some part of the tech stack deeply.

We'd love to see several of these as well:

• Understand distributed systems fundamentals and their tradeoffs: partitioning, replication, consistency vs. availability, latency vs. throughput, and delivery guarantees.

• Write code well in a back-end language (e.g. rust).

• Want to know how people use the data, not only how the back end works.

• Communicate clearly about technical topics.

• Want to work on hard problems on a small team that builds a new product.

Why Revel

• Work on hardware that matters—your customers build aerospace systems, advanced manufacturing lines, and critical infrastructure

• Real ownership—your field work shapes the product roadmap

• Competitive salary, substantial equity, and fast personal growth in a deeply technical career

• Small, ambitious team where your impact is immediate and visible

Join us to redefine what’s possible in software for hardware.

ITAR Requirements
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.