---
layout: job_family_page
title: "Distributed Systems Specialist"
---

## Responsibilities

* Work on large-scale, in-production distributed systems that enable GitLab to scale horizontally (e.g. [Gitaly](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/tree/master))
* Architect GitLab features that require distributed system expertise
* Optimize bottlenecks through performance monitoring and measurement
* Design and implement plans for increasing availability through partitioning/sharding
* Document answers and improves existing documentation
* Write blog posts relevant to the community

## Requirements

* Strong understanding of distributed consensus protocols (e.g. Paxos, Raft)
* Strong understanding of tradeoffs with sharding
* Experience creating and working with distributed systems
* Experience building and scaling highly-available systems
* Proficient in Ruby on Rails and/or Go

In addition, see the [Senior Developer job description](/job-families/senior-developer/).