Lead Distributed Systems Engineer

Job Description

We have an exciting and rewarding opportunity for you to take your software engineering career to the next level.

As a Distributed Systems Engineer at JPMorganChase, you’ll serve as a seasoned member of an agile team to design and deliver trusted, market-leading technology products in a secure, stable, and scalable way. You will be responsible for building and evolving critical backend platforms and services that operate reliably at scale across multiple systems, regions, and environments—supporting the firm’s business objectives.

We are seeking a dedicated professional who is a strong team player, self-motivated, and driven to achieve engineering excellence on short timescales.

This is an extremely hands-on, delivery-focused, technical position involving deep analysis, coding, testing, performance tuning, and close partnership with product, SRE/operations, and end users. Prior experience in financial services is desirable, but curiosity, strong fundamentals, and the ability to learn quickly are just as important. The role involves a high degree of teamwork, technical design reviews, and peer interaction.

Job Responsibilities

• Executes software solutions: leads design, development, and technical troubleshooting, thinking beyond routine approaches to build resilient distributed solutions and break down complex production problems.
• Builds secure, high-quality production services: develops and maintains low-latency and/or high-throughput services, background workers, and APIs with strong correctness and reliability guarantees.
• Designs for scale and reliability: produces architecture and design artifacts for complex distributed applications (e.g., service decomposition, data consistency patterns, caching, failover) and ensures design constraints are met in implementation.
• Ensures operational excellence: owns systems end-to-end including observability (metrics/logs/traces), incident response, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
• Works with large, diverse datasets: gathers, analyzes, and synthesizes signals from production telemetry and business data to drive continuous improvement and to inform reliability and scalability work.
• Identifies systemic issues: proactively detects hidden failure modes (hot partitions, thundering herds, cascading failures, backpressure gaps) and drives improvements to coding hygiene, testing strategy, and architecture.
• Collaborates across teams: partners with platform, infrastructure, security, and dependent application teams to deliver well-integrated capabilities and clear service contracts.
• Contributes to engineering communities: participates in communities of practice and events that explore new and emerging technologies and raises the bar through mentoring and design/code review.
• Builds inclusive culture: contributes to a team culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect.

Required qualifications, Capabilities & Skills

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related discipline.
• Recent, hands-on experience building distributed systems in one or more modern object-oriented languages.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, consensus basics, idempotency, concurrency, retries/timeouts, leader election, partitioning, replication, and failure handling.
• Practical experience in system design, application development, testing, and operational stability in production environments.
• Experience developing, debugging, and maintaining code in a large corporate environment, including familiarity with database querying and data modeling (SQL and/or NoSQL).
• Solid knowledge of the Software Development Life Cycle and engineering best practices (code review, automated testing, secure coding, release management).
• Working knowledge of agile methodologies and modern delivery practices such as CI/CD, application resiliency, and security controls.

Preferred qualifications, capabilities & skills

• Strong technology generalist – experience building highly performant and resilient enterprise applications used within a high performance/realtime environment.
• Experience working in a team with a strong software development process (build, test, deploy etc).      
• Experience in developing, debugging, and maintaining code in a large corporate environment with one or more modern programming languages and database querying languages
• A desire to learn more about the Financial products.