Distributed Systems & Reliability Engineer, Glydways
Autonomous electric transportation
Be an early applicant
Autonomous electric transportation
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
101-200 employees
Company mission
To provide a 24/7 mobility service solution that is environmentally net-negative in terms of greenhouse gas production (GHG), and, inherently profitable.
Role
Who you are
- Strong experience building and operating distributed, real-time backend systems (including C++ and Go services)
- Deep understanding of networked, message-driven architectures (TCP/UDP, connection management, backpressure, timeouts, heartbeats, long-lived connections). Distributed databases with internal or external message queues
- Proven track record designing and implementing high-availability and failover patterns (leader election, active/standby, hot/warm backups, multi-server or multi-cluster setups, load-balancing)
- Ability to design state replication and recovery mechanisms (snapshots, event logs, shared state stores, distributed key-value, streaming platforms) so services can resume from recent state with minimal disruption
- Expertise in idempotent, restart-safe operations and APIs that tolerate retries, duplicates, and out-of-order messages without corrupting state or violating safety constraints
- Strong background in observability and diagnostics: logging, metrics, tracing, SLO definition (latency, backlog, failover time, instance divergence) and debugging production states
- Experience with configuration-driven systems, deployment automation, and infrastructure as code (Kubernetes, Kustomize/Helm/Ansible or equivalent; rolling/blue-green/canary releases)
- Hands-on experience with automated testing for distributed systems, including integration, scenario-based, stress, fault-injection/chaos, and long-running soak tests
- Safety-critical mindset and comfort working in a requirements-driven environment, using FMEA-style thinking to reason about failure modes and mitigations
- Strong ownership and collaboration skills, working closely with developers, ops, and product to improve reliability over time rather than focusing on one-off features or algorithm research
What the job involves
- This role focuses on making Glydways' centralized planning system highly reliable, available, and restart-safe in real-world operations
- You will own the design and implementation of high-availability patterns, state replication and recovery, and robust observability for our real-time planning and coordination services
- You will work closely with autonomy, ops, and product teams to harden the existing behavior, ensure safe failover under faults, and drive down flaky and unsafe production states over time
- This is a senior engineering role for someone who wants to be the technical owner of a reliable distributed system in production
- Own the reliability, availability, and failover behavior of the centralized planning system in production, with a focus on high-availability architectures across servers and clusters
- Design and implement leader election, health checks, heartbeat protocols, and controlled failover/hand-off when instances fail or become partitioned
- Define and build state continuity mechanisms so backup instances can take over from recent state (tickets/trips/journeys, vehicle/site state, restrictions) instead of cold-starting
- Engineer restart-safe, idempotent workflows for trip/ticket handling and routing decisions so replays, retries, and partial failures do not cause double assignment or missing states
- Extend and refine recovery behaviors, ensuring the system gets to a safe state first and then resumes normal operations in a controlled, observable way
- Expand and maintain observability: logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts for key service indicators (latency, backlog, heartbeats, failover time, instance divergence)
- Harden configuration, pipelines, and deployments for the system and related services, including validation of config changes and safe rollout strategies (rolling, blue-green, canary)
- Design and maintain automated test and robustness suites, including scenario-based, stress, fault-injection/chaos, and long-running burn-in tests, and use results to drive hardening work
- Apply safety-critical, requirements-driven reasoning (including FMEA-style analyses) to functional changes, documenting assumptions and guarantees
- Collaborate with algorithm developers, Autonomy, Test Ops, and Product to align robustness and failover behavior with algorithmic guarantees, operational procedures, and milestones, and take long-term ownership of production health
Our take
Although more than 4000 cities across the globe meet the threshold for necessary urban mass transit systems, under 5% of them have the capacity to make it a reality. Glydways' autonomous electricity-powered transport systems could provide a cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative for the 95% without rail or transport systems.
Glydways' Personal Rapid Transit systems consist of battery-operated electric vehicles called Glydcars that travel on dedicated rights of way. These “roads” can be built above ground level or through tunnels, and can integrate with other forms of public transport already existing within the city or town.
Whilst the addition of Glydcars' infrastructure raises questions about additional costs, the company’s mass transit solution has nonetheless attracted positive attention and serious investment from the likes of Bill Gates' venture fund, Gates Frontier. Its Series C round of funding was followed by news that Glydway is involved in over 100 different mass transit projects, with a world tour of its vehicles taking place through 2025.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2024
$20m
SERIES B
Oct 2023
$56m
SERIES B
Total funding: $76m
Company HQ
Downtown, South San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Mark Seeger
(Co-Founder & Co-CEO)Previously Director of Digital Innovation at Ogilvy. Founded M Jeans and GreenIdea, and was a Product Design Engineer at Apple.
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