Junior Distributed Systems Engineer
Rokt
This job at a glance
- Who can apply
- New grads and up to 2 years
- Must know
- System designProduct managementData structures & algorithmsPythonJavaTypeScript
- Nice to have
- REST APIsDockerKubernetesAWS
- Work
- On-site in New York
- Pay
- Not stated by the employer.
- Skill demand
- Python54%System design17%Product management7%Data structures & algorithms5%of 99 similar entry-level jobs posted in the US this week
- Listed
- Nov 12, 2026 · still open
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About the Role
The Rokt Residency is an 18-week, full-time, paid early-career program for software engineers. This program will kick off January 2027, with the option for earlier start dates. Residents will have the opportunity to receive full-time offers to join Rokt as Builders upon completion.
How Your Future Team Uses AI
Rokt is an AI-first company where engineers are empowered to identify and fix problems. The team uses AI and automation tools to move faster. AI coding agents are used to write, test, and review code. Distributed systems teams leverage AI for incident investigation, latency tracing, test generation, and prototyping service changes. Residents will use enterprise AI tools from day one. Team placement will be based on interview performance, prior experience, and business needs, with opportunities to move into new teams and projects internally.
Distributed Systems at Rokt
Rokt's distributed systems power real-time offer selection decisions for billions of transactions annually. These services must be fast, reliable, and correct. Residents on this track will build and operate the services, APIs, and infrastructure behind these decisions.
Key Responsibilities
- Build and deploy backend services and APIs that decide which offer each customer sees in real time.
- Find and fix latency and throughput bottlenecks in services that handle billions of transactions a year.
- Build monitoring and alerting that detects problems in production before they reach customers.
- Build and use AI tools and automations to speed up coding, testing, and deployment.
- Work with product managers, data scientists, and senior Builders to ship features that drive revenue.
Requirements & Tech Stack
- Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and clean, tested code.
- Proficiency in at least one programming language, such as Go, Java, C#, Rust, TypeScript, or Python.
- Hands-on experience using AI coding tools to build software.
- Software engineering experience, including internships, personal projects, open-source work, or hackathons.
- Evidence of building and shipping something real that others use (e.g., a project, product, or tool).
- Drive: high standards, ownership beyond assigned tasks.
- Reasoning ability: breaking down hard problems and noticing critical details.
- Brilliant and humble: backing the best idea, helping teammates.
- Availability to work full time in the office in New York City for the full 18 weeks.
Preferred:
- Foundational understanding of networked services: APIs, concurrency, caching, and trade-offs.
- Experience building public cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) systems.
Compensation
- During the Residency:
- ~ $50.48/hour.
- Generous technology allowance for a Macbook Pro M5 + accessories (yours to keep after the residency).
- If a full-time offer is secured post-residency:
- Total target compensation: $127,000.
- Fixed annual salary: $120,000.
- Employee equity plan grant (RSUs).
- World-class benefits.
Final compensation is determined by the level assessed through the interview process and based on how your experience and skills map to Rokt's career ladder.