Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Platform

Aerospike•Mountain View, CA

53d•$190,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Aerospike is growing its Cloud Platform, a multi-cloud, multi-tenant platform designed to bring Aerospike to customers with simplicity, speed, and scale. The Staff Software Engineer will serve as a technical leader and key architect for the Cloud team, defining the architectural vision and driving execution of next-generation platform services. The role will shape how global enterprises deploy, manage, and scale Aerospike in the cloud, establishing technical standards for reliability, multi-tenancy, and scale across multi-cloud environments. The position covers architecture and system design for SaaS and control-plane services, distributed platform systems, and enterprise-grade multi-tenant services. It involves collaborating across product, security, infrastructure, and engineering leadership; setting technical roadmaps; resolving complex distributed-systems problems; establishing engineering and operational standards; and mentoring engineers.

Requirements

At least 8 years of hands-on experience building production distributed backend systems, with demonstrated leadership at the Staff or Lead level.
Broad experience deploying and operating production distributed databases and caching tiers, such as MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or Aerospike.
Deep understanding of NoSQL and relational data models, ACID and BASE consistency models, and caching strategies for high-throughput, low-latency applications.
Experience automating database operations at scale, including cluster provisioning, zero-downtime upgrades, backups, disaster recovery, and cross-region replication.
Practical experience with sharding, read/write splitting, replication topologies, connection pooling, and multi-node cluster rebalancing.
Deep expertise in statically typed languages for backend infrastructure service design; Go is strongly preferred, with Kotlin, Java, or C++ also identified.
Advanced experience across multiple major public clouds, including AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Deep proficiency with Kubernetes, container internals, and building Kubernetes Operators or Controllers.
Proven track record designing, launching, and operating enterprise-grade multi-tenant SaaS platforms or control planes on public cloud infrastructure.
Firm understanding of cloud security primitives, zero-trust architectures, OAuth, OIDC, mTLS, and encryption at rest and in transit.
Exceptional ability to break down ambiguous business problems into modular systems, negotiate technical trade-offs with stakeholders, and communicate technical vision to leadership and engineering teams.

Nice To Haves

Native fluency in Go.
Hands-on production experience with Aerospike core features or other ultra-low-latency NoSQL databases.
Proven track record developing custom Kubernetes Operators or Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for data-intensive applications.
Production experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or OpenTofu and modern GitOps/CI/CD practices such as ArgoCD or Flux.
Active contributions to open-source cloud-native or data infrastructure projects.

Responsibilities

Define the long-term technical vision and multi-cloud strategy for SaaS and control-plane services, aligned with enterprise customer requirements.
Partner with Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, and Executive Leadership to translate business needs into scalable technical roadmaps.
Architect high-throughput, multi-tenant control and data planes that manage distributed deployments under heavy load and strict SLA requirements.
Lead end-to-end architecture and system design for complex, large-scale multi-cloud platform services.
Collaborate with product leadership and principal architects to define and drive the multi-year Cloud technology roadmap.
Author RFCs and technical design documents and lead architecture review forums across engineering teams.
Debug, profile, and resolve cross-cutting distributed-systems issues involving networking, data consistency, multi-tenancy, and state management.
Establish standards for observability, high availability, security, and operational excellence across platform microservices.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and career development sponsorship.
Drive technical design reviews, engineering best practices, and efforts to raise organizational technical capability.
Prototype and evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies and drive architectural evolution in container orchestration, multi-cloud automation, and resilience engineering.