Senior Distributed Systems Engineer at Zanskar
Salt Lake City, UT
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Aug 17, 2026
Salt Lake City, UT
Sep 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A geothermal energy startup is hiring a distributed systems engineer to build and scale a multi-physics well-targeting compute engine used by geoscience research teams. The role involves designing fault-tolerant, event-driven architectures, managing cloud orchestration at scale, and migrating an existing system for greater reliability. It suits an experienced engineer comfortable working closely with scientists in a domain-heavy environment.
Senior level · 7+ years · Salt Lake City, UT · Full-time
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How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 95 people in the Salt Lake City, UT area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 20–140
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $132,450 (middle half $104,815–$164,275).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 20, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The role is clearly a software engineering role (building and scaling a distributed compute system), making 15-1252 the best fit. 15-1244 is noted as a runner-up because the posting also emphasizes operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure, but the primary emphasis on designing and shipping a distributed system tips it to Software Developers.
GCP and AWS appear together in the requirements section as co-equal options ('GCP, AWS'); GCP is listed first and treated as the primary, with AWS in alternatives.
Terraform and Pulumi are listed together as interchangeable IaC tools in the same requirement; Terraform is named first.
GitHub Actions is listed with 'or similar' — common substitutes added to alternatives. GitHub (version control) is listed as a separate, standalone requirement.
The 'plus' skills (experiment tracking, optimization methods, applied algorithm development, reinforcement learning, AI/ML, web development, geoscience familiarity) are listed under an explicit 'is a plus' qualifier and are marked preferred. Generic concepts (optimization methods, applied algorithm development, web development, geoscience familiarity) were omitted as they name no specific technology.
No compensation figures are stated in the posting.
Read the full posting
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