Senior Distributed Systems Engineer (Apache Pinot)

At StarTree, we're a group of passionate individuals dedicated to improving lives by developing tools and technologies that enhance availability and speed in real-time analytics.

Our mission is to simplify data-driven decision-making for every company, enabling them to delight both external and internal users while creating new revenue streams from their data. We are building the world’s most comprehensive and accessible cloud analytics system.

Team and Responsibilities

Apache Pinot is a distributed analytics database designed for real-time applications at massive scale. It powers critical workloads at companies like Splunk, Meesho, CrowdStrike, Together AI, and Charter Telecom, where milliseconds matter and scale is measured in millions of events and tens of thousands of queries per second.

CrowdStrike processes up to 120K events/sec and serves 25K queries/sec; Together AI analyzes billions of LLM token events per hour with sub-second latency; and Charter Telecom operates Pinot at an ingestion scale of 120M events/sec. These are not just benchmarks—they are production systems powering real customer experiences.

At StarTree, you’ll work on the distributed systems behind this scale, tackling challenges in performance, reliability, concurrency, and data infrastructure. You’ll make an impact from day one, take ownership of meaningful problems, and grow rapidly in a high-ownership startup environment.

You Will

• Own and drive impactful distributed systems problems end-to-end, from inception through production launch.
• Collaborate with a strong engineering team to identify and prioritize the most impactful problems and projects for the company.
• Raise the quality bar across engineering while ensuring our systems remain reliable and operationally lean.
• Mentor and grow engineers while learning from experienced, battle-tested engineers around you.

Skills & Experience

• Experience: 0-2 years.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals and experience solving problems at scale. Our platform is Java-based, so Java experience is a plus, but not a hard requirement.
• Bias toward execution — able to take an idea from concept through implementation and deliver it to production.
• Deep ownership of quality and customer experience, with a strong focus on reliability, observability, performance, and ease of use.
• Adaptability and flexibility — willing to take on whatever is most important for the company and adjust to changing priorities.
• Curiosity, positivity, and resilience — comfortable navigating ambiguity and uncertainty while maintaining a constructive, problem-solving mindset.

AI-First Mindset — Comfortable using AI tools in everyday engineering workflows and eager to continuously learn and integrate AI into building, debugging, testing, and solving problems.