Software Engineer - Distributed Systems & Infrastructure

Listed as a remote role based in Riga, Riga, Latvia. Hopsworks AB · Riga, Latvia · occasional presence at our Stockholm HQ About Hopsworks Hopsworks is a sovereign AI Lakehouse: a feature store, RonDB (our open-source key-value store, serving features in under a millisecond), and native support for Iceberg, Delta and Hudi, in one platform. With 5.0 we embedded Claude Code and Codex directly into it - terminal, dev containers, the lot - so teams describe the pipeline they want and an agent builds it without leaving the platform. We are European-founded, open-source at heart, and we ship everywhere: on-prem, air-gapped, regulated and newly released SaaS. Competing with the big platforms means the engineering has to be solid. The Role You'll work on the parts that make real-time AI hold up in production: the online store, the query services, the Kubernetes deployment stack, and everything that keeps the platform running from a laptop demo to an air-gapped enterprise cluster. Before you apply; this role is also customer-facing. Our customers run Hopsworks on their own infrastructure, and when something breaks at the intersection of their network, their Kubernetes cluster and our software, you are the one digging. Some of that work is glamorous. Most of it isn't. It is, however, where the hard problems live. What You'll Do Design, build and operate distributed systems: online feature serving (RonDB), query services, streaming ingestion, and the platform control plane. Own the Kubernetes deployment story - Helm charts, operators, upgrades, multi-cloud and on-prem or air-gapped installs. Work directly with customers: architecture reviews, deployment support, debugging production issues in their environments, and turning their pain into roadmap items. Use coding agents daily (Claude Code ships inside our own platform) and help make the platform a better place for them to work. Write documentation an engineer would read on purpose. What You Bring Solid experience building or operating distributed systems, databases, or large-scale backend infrastructure. Strength in at least one of C++, Java or Go, and the ability to read the others. Python for the glue. Real Kubernetes experience - not just deploying to it, but knowing what to do when networking, storage or an operator goes sideways at 4pm on a Friday. A firm grasp of database internals, SQL, and the trade-offs between consistency and speed. Familiarity with the streaming ecosystem: Kafka, Spark, Flink or similar. Comfort in front of customers. Clear when you explain, calm when it burns, honest when it's broken. Fluency with AI-assisted development. You know when to let the agent drive and when to take the wheel back. Nice to Have Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects. Experience with key-value stores or high-performance storage engines. Software shipped to regulated or air-gapped environments. Cloud depth (AWS, Azure, GCP) beyond the console basics. Why Hopsworks Based in Riga, with regular trips to the Stockholm HQ. A small team, short distances, and problems hard enough that we benchmark them at SIGMOD. Your work ends up in production AI systems at serious companies. Show more Show less Seniority level Entry level Employment type Full-time Job function Engineering and Information Technology Industries Software Development