The present application is directed towards systems and methods for distributing traffic across nodes of a cluster of intermediary devices through distributed flow distribution (DFD). Upon receipt of network traffic, a cluster node, such as an intermediary computing device or appliance, may internally steer a portion of the traffic via an inter-node communications backplane to one or more other nodes in the cluster so that the load is equally handled by all of the nodes in the cluster. A cluster node may determine whether to process the traffic steered via the backplane by computing a hash of packet parameters of the network traffic. Hash keys may be selected such that uniformity is assured, and the key used in hash computation may be synchronized across all of the nodes so that only one node determines that it should process the particular packets or traffic flow.