What is a distributed systems engineer?

The text discusses the skills and knowledge required for a distributed systems engineer. It emphasizes that microservices or service-oriented architecture (SoA) is not a distributed system, but rather involves state being distributed and rebalanced across the system in response to nodes coming and going, failures, and scaling events. Understanding hash rings, gossip protocols, consensus algorithms, eventually consistent data types, read/write consistencies, and deep understanding of network protocols are pre-requisites for a distributed systems engineer. The text also mentions that distributed systems engineers should have fundamentals in place such as programming languages, design patterns, version control, infrastructure management, and continuous integration and deployment systems.