---
title: 'Distributed Systems Engineer at Archil'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/distributed-systems-engineer-archil-san-francisco-21jft0ra16pn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Distributed Systems Engineer at Archil

- **Company:** Archil
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-06-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/archil/0f17544f-3070-4c4f-82c2-fa5ccad3423a

## Job description

## Role

As a distributed systems engineer, you’ll work across the stack to solve problems as they come up and help build Archil volumes. You’ll have significant influence over the technical and product direction. We’ll expect you to be able to:

- Be oncall for a production system to help our customers if anything goes wrong.
- Build out never-before-seen capabilities in a storage service
- Design distributed systems interactions for atomicity and idempotency
- Deploy infrastructure and generalize infrastructure across different clouds
- Operate through changing customer requirements with lots of ambiguity

Who are you?

- You have 3+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems (flexible).
- Ideally, you’ve worked at a startup before, so you know how chaotic this time can be.
- You’ve successfully resolved disagreements at work before, and you understand that the highest priority is helping our customers — not being right.
- You’re comfortable debugging problems that occur as a result of failures in multiple, different systems, using tools like metrics and logs.
- You’ve been paged at 3am to solve a complex production issue before.
- You’re knowledgeable about distributed systems: you get how consensus works, you know how to scale systems, and you know what pitfalls in API design to avoid.
- You’re familiar with how to optimize the performance of a system, including a general sense of how much latency different operations take, and what kind of bottlenecks could lead to a reduction in potential throughput.
- Most of all, you know how computers work from the silicon up. Someone once asked you in an interview “what happens when you go to [Google.com](http://Google.com)”, and there wasn’t enough time in the interview to talk about all of the steps.

Why join us? By building the highest-performance, simplest storage product in the cloud, we have a great chance of changing how the world builds the next-generation of applications (and with AI, more applications will be written in the next 5 years than ever before). We’d love for your to be a part of our journey. How to join?

- Show us that you’re knowledgeable about the space that we’re working in on your application. It’s up to you how you do this, but one potential way is by answering one of the following questions:
- How do you think our system works?
- What do you think our biggest technical challenge is?
- What would make our system not work?

## About Archil

[Archil](https://archil.com/) is on a mission to change how developers build applications in the cloud, by building the next, default storage platform in the cloud. Over the past 15 years, S3 has become the default way to store inactive data sets in the cloud, but the next-generation of AI and analytics applications need to actively process more data than ever before. We're solving this problem by building the first Volume storage product that's as fast as EBS, infinitely scaleable like S3, and connects to existing data sets in S3 and other repositories. Our customers choose Archil because this architecture radically simplifies how they think about working with their data (every application becomes stateless, no cold-start latencies, and no need to worry about checkpointing or backup). [Hacker News agrees.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42174204) Hunter, the founder, has 10 years of experience building and operating cloud storage, including helping to launch Amazon's EFS product and working on bleeding-edge storage at Netflix. He started the company after working with hundreds of customers across these roles, and identifying a need for a new kind of storage product. We're fully in-person in San Francisco. If you're also someone interested in distributed systems, completely focused on how to make customers successful, and interested in solving really big technical challenges, we'd love for you to join us.

## About Archil

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Archil provides a high-performance, POSIX-compatible cloud filesystem that transforms AWS S3 buckets into infinite, local-like storage for AI and analytics workloads.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; $11M Series A led by Standard Capital, total $18M raised)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Hunter Leath (Founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Cloud infrastructure / Data storage / AI infrastructure
- **Target Customers**: AI teams (model training, inference), analytics teams, data scientists, cloud engineering teams – primarily B2B enterprise and startup users of AWS S3.
- **Mission / Purpose**: “To make cloud storage invisible — reliable enough that teams stop thinking about it and fast enough that it never slows them down.” [archil.com/about](https://archil.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Archil Cloud Filesystem**: A POSIX-compatible, infinite-capacity filesystem that sits on top of existing S3 buckets. It delivers 30x faster reads/writes compared to direct S3 access, costs 90% less than provisioning EBS volumes, and requires zero code changes. Data is automatically synced back to S3 in minutes, enabling sharing and collaboration. (Type: Cloud infrastructure/SaaS) [archil.com](https://archil.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $18M (including an $11M Series A and seed round)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Standard Capital (lead, Series A), Felicis, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Peak XV, and strategic operators from AWS, Netflix, Uber, Datadog, Pure Storage, Snowflake, and Chroma. [archil.com/about](https://archil.com/about)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Y Combinator batch Fall 2024. [ycombinator.com/companies/archil](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/archil)
  - Team grew from ~5 to 11-12 employees within first year.
  - Founded by Hunter Leath, who previously led AWS Elastic File System and Netflix’s cloud storage team.
  - Actively hiring for senior engineering roles (Distributed Systems Engineer). [builtin.com/company/archil](https://builtin.com/company/archil)

## Competitive Advantages
- **POSIX-compatible out of the box**: No code changes or SDKs needed; works with existing applications seamlessly.
- **Cost breakthrough**: 90% cheaper than EBS for local-like performance.
- **Performance**: 30x faster than direct S3 access with a shared, high-speed cache.
- **Scalability**: Infinite capacity; automatically scales without manual disk management.
- **Founder expertise**: Deep cloud storage domain experience from AWS and Netflix, ensuring credible, battle-tested architecture.

## Strategic Focus
- **Expand AI/ML workload adoption**: Enable inference and training without data movement delays.
- **Deepen AWS ecosystem integration**: Archil is purpose-built for S3, leveraging its ubiquity.
- **Scale the engineering team**: Currently hiring senior distributed systems engineers to accelerate product development.
- **Build enterprise trust**: Working with early customers in AI, analytics, and serverless to validate reliability.

## Why Work Here
- **High-impact infrastructure**: Work on a core storage layer that powers next-gen AI and data applications.
- **Expert team**: Collaborate with engineers from AWS, Netflix, Snowflake, and other top-tier infra companies.
- **Culture**: In-office (San Francisco), small team (~12), direct exposure to founder and early product decisions.
- **Perks**: Not detailed publicly, but the role offers deep ownership of distributed systems and a chance to shape a disruptive product from an early stage.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: On-site only – employees work from the San Francisco office (as per Built In). [builtin.com/company/archil](https://builtin.com/company/archil)

## Sources
1. [archil.com](https://archil.com/)
2. [archil.com/about](https://archil.com/about)
3. [builtin.com/company/archil](https://builtin.com/company/archil)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/archil](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/archil)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/archil](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/archil)

## Other roles at Archil

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