About this role
Business Area
Engineering
Seniority Level
Mid-Senior level
Job Description
At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry. Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.
We are looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to join the Cloudera Cloud Factory and play a pivotal role in shaping the architecture, engineering direction, and technical execution of our next generation of cloud and data platform capabilities.
This is a senior technical leadership role for an engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong systems thinking, architectural judgment, and the ability to influence across teams. You will work on complex, high-scale distributed systems and help translate product and platform requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions.
You will operate across team boundaries, partnering closely with Engineering, Product, Architecture, and other R&D teams to define technical strategy and deliver critical capabilities.
What You’ll Do
- Own and drive the technical direction for significant areas of the Cloudera Cloud Factory platform.
- Design and evolve highly scalable, resilient, and secure distributed systems across cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.
- Lead architecture and technical design for complex, cross-cutting initiatives with significant customer and business impact.
- Act as a technical authority and trusted advisor for engineers, technical leaders, and architects across the organization.
- Identify architectural gaps, technical debt, scalability challenges, and opportunities to simplify and modernize the platform.
- Establish engineering patterns, standards, and best practices that improve the quality, reliability, and maintainability of the platform.
- Work closely with Product Management to translate customer and business requirements into pragmatic technical strategies.
- Drive technical alignment across multiple engineering teams and influence decisions beyond your immediate organization.
- Lead technical initiatives from early-stage exploration and design through implementation, production adoption, and continuous improvement.
- Mentor and develop senior and staff-level engineers, helping raise the technical bar across the organization.
- Participate in and influence technical reviews, architecture forums, design discussions, and strategic planning.
- Balance short-term delivery requirements with long-term platform strategy and architectural integrity.
- Represent Engineering in cross-functional and customer-facing technical discussions when required.
What You Bring
- Extensive experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and cloud platforms.
- Deep expertise in software engineering, system architecture, and modern cloud-native technologies.
- Proven experience operating as a technical leader across multiple engineering teams, without relying on direct reporting relationships.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts including scalability, availability, fault tolerance, consistency, observability, and performance.
- Experience working with public cloud platforms and/or hybrid-cloud environments.
- Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous, complex problems and turn them into clear technical strategies and executable plans.
- Strong track record of delivering technically complex products or platform capabilities into production.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both deeply technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong engineering judgment and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between architectural purity, delivery velocity, operational complexity, and customer value.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture and technical standards.
Preferred Experience
- Experience with cloud management, Kubernetes, container orchestration, or cloud-native infrastructure.
- Experience building data platforms, distributed data services, or large-scale data management systems.
- Experience across AWS, Azure, GCP, or other public cloud environments.
- Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud architectures.
- Experience contributing to or working with open-source software.
- Experience driving large-scale architectural modernization or platform transformation.
- Experience working in a product-led engineering organization with globally distributed teams.
Technical Leadership Expectations
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be expected to operate beyond the boundaries of an individual team.
You will
Think at platform scale — understand how individual technical decisions affect the broader product and engineering ecosystem.
Lead through influence — build alignment across teams and drive decisions without relying on organizational authority.
Own outcomes, not just designs — remain accountable for the technical success of initiatives from architecture through production.
Raise the technical bar — mentor engineers, challenge assumptions, establish strong engineering practices, and create reusable patterns.
Connect technology to customer value — ensure architectural and technical decisions ultimately improve customer experience, product capability, reliability, and business outcomes.
Why Join Us
This is an opportunity to have significant influence over the technical direction of Cloudera Cloud Factory, working alongside highly experienced engineers and architects to build the foundation for Cloudera's next generation of cloud and data platform capabilities.
You will have the autonomy to solve some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, while helping shape the engineering practices and architecture that will support the platform for years to come.
What you can expect from us
- Generous PTO Policy
- Support work life balance with Unplugged Days
- Flexible WFH Policy
- Mental & Physical Wellness programs
- Phone and Internet Reimbursement program
- Access to Continued Career Development
- Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages
- Paid Volunteer Time
- Employee Resource Groups
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