Staff / Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
CloudZero is hiring Staff and Principal Software Engineers across its engineering organization, building a bench of senior technical talent across multiple teams rather than filling a single position. These roles combine technical depth with product impact. Engineers lead architecture and implementation, shape roadmaps, mentor others, and drive decisions with lasting effects. The specific domain depends on the team. Potential teams include Agent Platform, which develops AI telemetry and Kubernetes metric agents; Billing Ingest, which owns backend data processing, storage, and query infrastructure; Platform Services and Applications, which builds customer-facing cost intelligence features and enterprise identity and authentication capabilities; Integrations, which develops billing connectors and AI data ingestion pipelines; and Cost Optimization, which owns features such as Optimize, Anomaly Detection, Ticket Integrations, Notifications, Views, and Budgets. CloudZero describes itself as the AI ROI Company, providing a financial control plane that helps finance, IT, and engineering connect AI spending to outcomes. The company says it serves major cloud spenders, processed 14 trillion billing events in the last twelve months, is a listed partner on Anthropic's cost and usage API, and has raised more than $119 million, including a $56 million Series C. The company describes its workplace as collaborative and fast-moving, valuing ownership, creativity, and curiosity. It offers the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology and contribute to the company's growth.
Requirements
- Significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or another backend language, and comfort reading and reasoning about systems written in other languages.
- Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), distributed systems, and the tradeoffs associated with scale.
- Experience with data pipelines, ETL frameworks, or stream processing in production environments.
- Strong SQL skills and hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar.
- Hands-on use of AI tools in personal data platform work, with the ability to describe workflows and failure modes; strategy-deck-only AI experience does not qualify.
- Experience building something adopted by other internal teams, such as a library, pattern, or service.
- Ability to communicate technical complexity clearly to engineers, product teams, and leadership.
- A track record of shipping work, not only designing it.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building or operating agents, telemetry systems, or observability tooling.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, especially in customer-managed environments.
- Experience with AWS Step Functions, Lambda, or event-driven architectures.
- Background in FinOps, billing systems, or financial data infrastructure.
- Exposure to ML pipelines or AI workload cost modeling.
Responsibilities
- Own significant technical domains end to end, including architecture, implementation, and the long-term health of systems.
- Make and communicate high-impact design decisions across teams and stakeholders.
- Identify and drive improvements to performance, scalability, and reliability before they become incidents.
- Collaborate with product, engineering leadership, and customers to scope problems and deliver business-impacting solutions.
- Raise the technical bar through code reviews, design feedback, and direct mentorship.
- Work autonomously and identify worthwhile problems without needing a ticket.
- Depending on the team, design data models, ship telemetry agents, develop data pipelines and query infrastructure, build customer-facing features, or maintain billing connectors.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
