Ritual is hiring a Distributed Systems Engineer in Engineering — Remote. The overview below is synthesized from the employer posting on job-boards.greenhouse.io: factual requirements and scope are preserved, but prose is rewritten with editorial context. Verify details and apply via the employer link.
About Ritual
Company context from the listing:
Ritual is building a sovereign, execution layer for AI, with our private testnet already live and running. The Ritual chain is the first blockchain custom-built to support AI-native operations, designed from the ground up to enable a new class of applications at the intersection of crypto and AI.
About the role
Day-to-day scope for the Distributed Systems Engineer as described in the posting:
As a Distributed Systems Engineer at Ritual, you'll be instrumental in building and scaling our heterogeneous blockchain infrastructure. You'll work on innovative solutions for node specialization, consensus mechanisms, and distributed AI execution while ensuring the reliability and performance of our network.
- Design and implement distributed systems components for Ritual's heterogeneous compute network
- Develop and optimize peer-to-peer networking protocols optimized for AI model execution and blockchain consensus
- Build and maintain infrastructure for node monitoring, metrics collection, and system observability
- Architect solutions for efficient state management and synchronization across specialized nodes
- Collaborate with the research team to implement novel distributed systems algorithms
- Create robust testing frameworks for distributed system components
About you
Company context from the listing:
- Deep expertise in Go and/or Rust, with a track record of building production-grade distributed systems
- Strong understanding of peer-to-peer systems, networking, and messaging protocols
- Proven experience operating and developing blockchain nodes, with deep knowledge of node architecture and consensus mechanisms
- Experience optimizing high-throughput systems and implementing performance improvements at scale
- Advanced Linux expertise, with strong command line proficiency and system administration skills
- Proficiency with infrastructure orchestration tools like Kubernetes
- Mastery of monitoring and observability tools such as Grafana and Prometheus
- Experience designing and implementing fault-tolerant, high-performance distributed applications
- Strong background in system design, with the ability to make architectural decisions that balance performance, reliability, and scalability
- Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex distributed systems issues
- Ability to act quickly under high pressure scenarios and context switch at a high frequency
- A high level of end-to-end ownership and self-direction, with excellent communication skills
- Hungry, high-energy and ability to work within and meet deadlines in a fast-paced environment
Nice to have
Additional experience noted as a plus:
- Familiarity with AI/ML systems and their distributed computing requirements
- Knowledge of cryptography and secure systems design
- Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects
Why join us
What the posting highlights about the offer:
- Join a passionate group of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to build the next generation of AI infrastructure
- Highly competitive compensation package, including annual discretionary bonus & optimized tax structure compared to the vast majority of web3 startups
- Top 1% of benefits across the web3 startup space
- 100% of premiums covered on highest quality healthcare
- Aggressive company 401k match
- Fully remote and/or hybrid, up to you!
- Participate in virtual and in-person events
- Much much more!
Build a standout application
For the Distributed Systems Engineer at Ritual, reviewers look for concise evidence over buzzwords. Mirror the language of the posting sparingly, quantify support or delivery outcomes, and show how you handled ambiguity, time-zone collaboration and user empathy. Keep your resume to impact, keep your cover note to one page, and link to artifacts — tickets resolved, docs shipped, dashboards owned — that prove you can operate in a fast-moving Web3 team. Prepare to discuss a time you turned a confusing user report into a clear fix and how you measure quality in support and operations.
Web3 hiring values reliability: on-time follow-through, clear writing, and a track record of improving runbooks and tooling. Treat the application as a work sample. For interviews, be ready to walk through how you prioritize across time zones, handle a difficult user, and decide when to escalate versus resolve directly. Show how you document decisions so the next teammate benefits.
In a distributed Web3 org, trust builds through written clarity. Use the cover note to demonstrate it.