Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

About fomo

• fomo is a trading app for the rest of us. Sign up in seconds and start trading right away, with no prior experience needed. Our social features are actually useful: follow top traders, see their full portfolios and trades, and find opportunities early. Under the hood, we deliver best-in-class execution and data for experienced traders.
• In just over a year, fomo has onboarded over 3.4 million plus users who have collectively done over $28 billion dollars in trading volume.
• fomo has made over $100M of revenue since launching in May 2025, and has raised a total of ~$100M in addition from T1 investors. Investors include Benchmark, Index Ventures, and Union Square Ventures.
• https://fomo.family/
• https://x.com/fomo

Want to learn more about the team, our growth, and life at fomo? Check out our Work at fomo page.

About the role

• We are looking for a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer to own the reliability, scalability, and performance of our multi-region backend platform.
• You will own critical shared infrastructure, including datastores, caches, messaging systems, and regional application services, and design systems that remain predictable during traffic surges, dependency failures, infrastructure changes, and partial regional outages.
• You will also establish new failover and disaster-recovery capabilities within our stack, including defining recovery objectives and implementing the systems and testing required to recover services and data safely.
• This is a hands-on engineering role with direct ownership of production systems. You will build and operate application and infrastructure components while improving data systems and observability.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate high-throughput, multi-region services.
• Improve datastore and cache performance, capacity, replication, and failure handling.
• Implement backpressure, concurrency limits, load shedding, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and bounded retries.
• Reduce cross-region latency and improve data locality.
• Design and test service, datastore, and regional failover procedures.
• Help architect new features to operate at scale from day one.
• Level-up the team on how to think about scale.

Qualifications

• 12 or more years of backend, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience designing and debugging distributed, high-throughput production systems.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including query performance, indexing, connection pooling, replication, transaction contention, and failure modes.
• Strong experience with Redis-compatible systems such as Redis, Valkey, Dragonfly, or KeyDB, including sharding, replication, memory management, hot keys, and failure handling.
• Experience operating services on AWS, ideally using ECS, RDS, and ElastiCache.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform.
• Proficiency in Go, TypeScript/Node.js, or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Hands-on experience designing and testing failover and disaster-recovery systems, including backup restoration, replication, regional failover, and RTO/RPO validation.

Nice to have

• Experience with NATS JetStream, Kafka, or another durable messaging system.
• Familiarity with Datadog APM and AWS Performance Insights.
• Experience performing live datastore or cache topology migrations.
• Experience operating systems with bursty or unpredictable traffic.
• Experience with financial, trading, cryptocurrency, gaming, or other high-throughput systems.

Compensation and benefits

fomo offers

• Competitive cash compensation and equity
• Comprehensive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision for you and your dependents; including tax savings benefits such as HSAs and FSAs
• 401(k) with match
• Group term life insurance
• Flexible time off
• Annual company offsites

Equal opportunity

fomo is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the hiring process, please let us know.