Staff Distributed Systems Engineer, Account Master

What to Expect

Account Master is Tesla’s data record for customers and their assets - think demographics, driver & Robotaxi rider profiles, preferences, or the Powerwall linked to your account. Nearly every surface at Tesla reads from that record, so when the data’s off, customers lose access to what should be theirs - this gets increasingly complex when a product gets delivered, serviced, shared, or transferred. The work now is to keep that data honest as volume heads toward 50,000 QPS and the mix of vehicles, energy systems, and access relationships on an account expands. We’re looking for a distributed systems expert to own this platform end to end: the architecture across services, the contracts other teams build against, and the operational bar the system has to clear.

What You’ll Do

• Set the multi-year architecture for how MySQL, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch stay consistent as the schema and traffic evolve
• Own the public data contract that downstream products across Tesla depend on — API shape, event schemas, and compatibility guarantees
• Design and evolve the Kafka change-propagation model so downstream products see changes in order, and can be replayed or backfilled without double-applying
• Drive the platform toward 50,000 QPS — partitioning, backpressure, and failure handling for both single-asset and multi-asset accounts
• Define the SLO framework for availability, latency, and correctness that this team and its partners operate against, and the measurement behind it (reconciliation lag, divergence rate, event-loss detection)
• Lead cross-team design reviews for changes that touch customer or asset data, and unblock other teams' designs before they hit production
• Own security, authorization, and audit for customer and asset data, including how AI agent workflows written in Python access it. This data is in scope for GDPR, CCPA, and similar privacy laws
• Carry the pager, respond to alerts, and eliminate recurring incidents at the class level, not one at a time
• Raise the team's bar for testing retries, duplicate events, and replay; mentor senior engineers on the team and grow the technical bench
• Write the design docs that shape how this platform evolves, and review the ones that touch it

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years building backend systems, including prior production ownership of a distributed system at comparable scale — tens of thousands of QPS, cross-store consistency, high-cardinality PII
• Strong Go programming ability; working Python is a plus for the AI-agent surface
• Deep Kafka experience: ordering, consumer failure, retries, idempotency, and replay
• MySQL, plus a search or analytical store (Elasticsearch or Click House)
• Track record of driving technical decisions across multiple teams and shipping the outcome
• Deep judgment on schema evolution, backward compatibility, and migration risk on live systems that other products depend on. CDC, outbox, or equivalent patterns in production
• Familiarity with a large-scale batch or reconciliation framework — Spark preferred
• Experience defining SLOs and correctness measurement, not just meeting them
• Real operational experience (monitoring, alerting, on-call, incident response) with a history of eliminating recurring incident classes
• Ability to write design docs partner teams can build against, and to run the reviews that shape theirs