Senior Staff Software Engineer - Cloudera Cloud Factory

Cloudera•US-Wisconsin-Remote, WI

2d•Remote

About The Position

Cloudera is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to shape the architecture, engineering direction, and technical execution of its next-generation cloud and data platform capabilities within the Cloudera Cloud Factory. This senior technical leadership role involves working on complex, large-scale distributed systems and translating product and platform requirements into robust, scalable technical solutions. The engineer will work across team boundaries with Engineering, Product, Architecture, and other R&D teams to define technical strategy and deliver critical capabilities. The role owns the technical direction of significant platform areas and leads architecture and design for complex initiatives with substantial customer and business impact. It also involves identifying technical debt and architectural opportunities, establishing engineering standards, aligning teams, and guiding initiatives from exploration through production and ongoing improvement. The engineer mentors senior and staff-level colleagues, participates in technical and strategic forums, balances near-term delivery with long-term platform strategy, and represents Engineering in cross-functional and customer-facing discussions when needed.

Requirements

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 leading technically 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 with public cloud platforms and/or hybrid-cloud environments.
Ability to turn ambiguous, complex problems into clear technical strategies and executable plans.
Track record of delivering technically complex products or platform capabilities into production.
Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong engineering judgment and ability to make pragmatic trade-offs among architectural integrity, delivery velocity, operational complexity, and customer value.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering culture and technical standards.

Nice To Haves

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 in a product-led engineering organization with globally distributed teams.

Responsibilities

Own and drive the technical direction for significant areas of the Cloudera Cloud Factory platform.
Design and evolve 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.
Serve as a technical authority and advisor to 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 platform quality, reliability, and maintainability.
Partner with Product Management to translate customer and business requirements into pragmatic technical strategies.
Drive technical alignment across engineering teams and influence decisions beyond the immediate organization.
Lead technical initiatives from exploration and design through implementation, production adoption, and continuous improvement.
Mentor and develop senior and staff-level engineers and help 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.
Own technical outcomes from architecture through production, lead through influence, establish reusable practices, and connect technical decisions to customer and business value.