Distributed Systems Architect: Bare-Metal and High-Scale

We need someone who's built the thing other engineers just rent. Not someone who's deployed a managed Kafka instance, someone who's clustered it themselves, rack by rack, and knows exactly what happens when a node drops mid-write. Analog's clients don't get to call AWS support, so the person designing their infrastructure has to have already lived through the failure modes that cloud providers hide from everyone else.

Mapping Analog's cloud components to their open-source, on-prem equivalents (Kafka/Redpanda, EMQX, ClickHouse/Druid, Ceph/MinIO), and documenting exactly what's gained and lost in each swap

Designing multi-node clustering, rack-aware replication, and quorum topologies for bare-metal Kafka/Redpanda and Postgres (Patroni) clusters

Tuning Linux at the level most people never touch: kernel parameters, NUMA bindings, NVMe I/O scheduling, CPU affinity, IRQ balancing, all to eliminate hardware bottlenecks under petabyte-scale write loads

Writing implementation-ready blueprints and runbooks precise enough that our DevOps team can execute them with Terraform and Ansible, no architectural guesswork required

Reviewing client hardware specs before deployment and giving a clear go or no-go call

There's no layer of management between your design and what actually ships, if your blueprint is wrong, you'll know, because it's the DevOps team that automates exactly what you hand them. This is implementation-grade architecture, not a slide deck: the quality of your output is the difference between a client's system surviving a hardware failure or not. You'll also be building a reusable library of reference architectures that every future air-gapped deployment draws from, so the work compounds.

If your distributed systems experience is entirely on managed cloud services, this isn't the role to learn bare metal for the first time. Same if you need a layer of process or a large team around you to make architectural calls, or if what you actually want is to oversee infrastructure rather than build and tune it yourself. This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to be the one person a client's survival depends on.