This seems like a pretty generic question, so I assume you're looking at it from a new grad standpoint. Distributed Systems is more of a technical/resource spe

This seems like a pretty generic question, so I assume you're looking at it from a new grad standpoint. Distributed Systems is more of a technical/resource specialty. You will be optimizing data across multiple systems. You'll want to measure it, improve overall performance/size/cost through algorithm and heuristic optimizations. It can be a terminal career state, meaning that plenty of people have a great career ending with the title: Distributed Systems Engineer. The progression within this career is similar to other Software Engineering roles. You are taking on larger projects, more team coordination, more business critical or technical complex problems.