Founding Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems

About REM Labs

REM Labs is building an autonomous software delivery platform that executes engineering workflows end to end with enterprise-grade reliability, control, and governance.

As AI systems begin participating directly in engineering workflows, the hard problem is no longer output generation or agent orchestration. It is reliable execution, safety, and explainability.

We are building the execution infrastructure that makes this possible.

Role Overview

We are hiring a Founding Principal Engineer, Distributed Systems to help build the architectural and execution foundations of REM.

This is a deeply technical founding role for engineers who think in distributed systems, execution semantics, failure handling, control planes, reliability, and long-running workflow infrastructure, but who also remain deeply hands-on builders.

You will work directly with the founder and early engineering team to design and build the core execution systems that power autonomous engineering workflows inside enterprise environments.

This is not an architecture governance, advisory, or solution architecture role.

We are explicitly looking for principal-level engineers who still enjoy building production systems, writing code, owning difficult implementation problems, and operating close to the runtime.

The right person will help define REM's architecture while also directly owning and building critical platform capabilities.

Strong candidates typically have designed and operated production systems where correctness, failure recovery, distributed coordination, execution guarantees, and operational reliability materially mattered.

Typically, strong candidates bring 8–16 years of hands-on engineering experience across distributed systems, platform engineering, workflow infrastructure, execution systems, or large-scale backend platforms.

This is one of the highest-leverage technical roles at REM. The right person will shape the platform's architecture, engineering rigor, and technical direction by building alongside the founding team, not by operating above it.

What You Will Work On

Core Platform Architecture

Define the architectural foundations of REM's execution platform.

Workflow Execution Systems

Design systems that orchestrate long-running engineering workflows across tools, services, and enterprise infrastructure.

Control Plane Architecture

Design orchestration, coordination, governance, scheduling, and execution visibility layers.

Reliability and Failure Recovery

Define mechanisms for retries, compensation handling, execution guarantees, failure isolation, idempotency, and correctness under partial failure.

Distributed State Management

Architect how execution context, workflow state, history, retries, and recovery semantics are modeled and persisted.

Runtime Observability

Build deep introspection into execution state, transitions, debugging, auditability, and operational correctness.

Autonomous Execution Boundaries

Help define safe interaction boundaries between deterministic execution infrastructure and autonomous AI-driven systems.

Product and Design Thinking

Partner closely on product architecture, operator experience, and design decisions that shape how enterprise users observe, control, debug, and trust autonomous execution systems.

Technical Leadership

Set engineering standards, architectural principles, technical decision frameworks, and long-term platform direction.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for engineers who naturally think in systems, abstractions, invariants, tradeoffs, execution semantics, and long-term architectural quality.

Strong candidates usually demonstrate deep ownership across system design, execution infrastructure, platform engineering, reliability-critical systems, or distributed systems architecture.

Strong signals include:

• building core platform infrastructure from scratch
• architecting distributed systems with meaningful scale and operational complexity
• owning reliability-critical backend systems
• designing distributed coordination or workflow execution systems
• making foundational architectural decisions under ambiguity
• remaining deeply hands-on while operating at principal-level technical scope

This role is not a fit for candidates whose recent work has been primarily architecture governance, solution architecture, delivery leadership, or people management without meaningful implementation depth.

You should be comfortable operating in highly ambiguous, zero-to-one environments where technical decisions carry long-term architectural consequences.

What Success Looks Like

In the first few months, success means:

• shaping REM's core architectural direction
• making foundational platform decisions
• defining execution semantics and reliability principles
• accelerating engineering quality and systems design rigor
• helping establish strong technical standards across the team
• contributing to architecture discussions with customers, partners, and technical stakeholders where needed

Over time, this role is expected to become one of the most important technical leadership roles in the company.

Team Culture

We are building a highly technical and deeply collaborative engineering culture centered around ownership, systems thinking, intellectual honesty, and long term architectural quality.

We care deeply about:

• First principles thinking
• Strong engineering judgement
• Wicked smart energy
• Low ego collaboration
• High agency
• Building durable systems rather than short term hacks

This is a founding stage environment. The problems are ambiguous, the constraints evolve rapidly, and the systems being designed often do not yet have established patterns.

Location

Bangalore

Compensation

• Competitive cash compensation
• Meaningful founding stage equity ownership
• Long term technical and organizational influence