Senior Software Engineer

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.

What You'll Build

Cloudera is reimagining object storage for the Kubernetes era. You will contribute to the design and implementation of AWC (Anywhere Cloud), our control plane for running data infrastructure on any Kubernetes cluster. You will work within the foundational services layer to ensure our storage solutions are performant, scalable, and resilient.The Technical Surface

You will work across the AWC stack, contributing to:

• Rust: Implementing high-performance components using async I/O with tokio and ensuring safe, reliable data handling.

• Go: Developing Kubernetes-native controllers and operators to manage lifecycle events, stateful sets, and resource orchestration.

• Kubernetes: Operating within complex cluster environments, utilizing features like mTLS (Istio), pod affinity, and custom resource definitions (CRDs).

• Distributed Systems: Contributing to logic for erasure coding, consensus protocols (e.g., Ratis), and data replication strategies.

What You'll Actually Do

• Build & Ship: Take ownership of features from design specification to production validation, ensuring high code quality and test coverage.

• Collaborate: Partner with team members across Rust, Go, and Java to connect disparate layers of the stack.

• Quality Assurance: Participate in rigorous code reviews, focusing on invariant verification and clear failure mode articulation.

• Solve Problems: Engage in root cause analysis for distributed system defects, proposing and implementing long-term architectural solutions rather than temporary patches.

• Document: Create and maintain technical design specs, ensuring architectural decisions are clear for the rest of the engineering team.

What You Bring - Required

• Experience: 5+ years of experience building production-grade distributed systems. You have owned systems through the full lifecycle, from design and implementation to on-call support.

• Languages: Strong expertise in at least one of Rust, Go, or Java. You are comfortable diving into a multi-language codebase and picking up new languages as needed.

• Systems Knowledge: Deep understanding of distributed systems principles (e.g., consensus, consistency models, latency vs. durability tradeoffs).

• Kubernetes Proficiency: Experience with Kubernetes internals, such as controllers, operators, or networking across CNI/Istio.

• Pragmatism: You balance the "perfect" architectural solution with the reality of shipping production software on time. You push back on unnecessary complexity.

Strongly  Preferred

• Storage Background: Experience with HDFS, S3, Apache Ozone, or similar object storage systems.

• Performance Engineering: Experience profiling and optimizing systems (e.g., using flamegraphs or allocator tuning) to improve throughput or latency.

• Open Source: A history of contributing to CNCF or Apache projects (e.g., kubebuilder, controller-runtime, RocksDB, tonic). 

Bonus

• Erasure Coding: Familiarity with ISA-L, Jerasure, or understanding how CPU vectorization impacts reconstruction throughput.

• Service Mesh: Experience debugging mTLS handshakes or optimizing L7 proxy configurations.

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