Senior Staff Software Engineer, Cloudera
Platform Engineering
More information about location
Hybrid cloud platform for any data
Be an early applicant
Hybrid cloud platform for any data
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To deliver an enterprise data cloud that provides cloud-native services to manage and secure the entire data lifecycle from ingest to experimentation, from the Edge to AI, in any cloud or data center.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent, and 7+ years of experience
- Experience with deploying ML/LLM-backed features in production
- Expertise in at least one primary language (Rust preferred) and ecosystem (e.g., Python, Go, or Java) and cloud-native architectures (containers, service mesh, queues, eventing)
- Proven experience in integrating AI/ML models into user interfaces. This is more than just calling an API; you should have experience building features like AI-powered assistants, natural language interfaces (e.g., text-to-SQL), proactive suggestions, or intelligent data visualization
- Familiarity with the AI/ML ecosystem: You understand the fundamentals of LLMs, vector databases, RAG, and prompt engineering. Experience with tools like MLflow, LangChain, or Hugging Face is a significant plus
- Security & privacy mindset: Familiarity with data governance, PII handling, tenant isolation, and compliance considerations
Desirable
- Platform thinking: Experience designing reusable AI workflow primitives, SDKs, or internal platforms used by multiple product teams
- Model ops: Experience with model lifecycle management, feature/embedding stores, prompt/version management, and offline/online eval systems
- Search & data infra: Experience with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), retrieval strategies, and indexing pipelines
- Observability: Built robust tracing/metrics/logging for AI systems; familiarity with quality dashboards and prompt diff tooling
- Cost strategy: Experience with model selection, distillation, caching layers, router policies, and autoscaling to manage spend
- Safety/abuse prevention: Experience implementing guardrails, content filters, and safe tool execution
- Optional but good to have: Exposure to Big Data technologies – Spark/Trino
- Experience with managing machine learning workloads on container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, including setting up GPU resources, managing distributed training jobs, and deploying models at scale
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of AI-powered workflows that are core to our product
- You will define the technical strategy, set quality and reliability standards, and deliver end-to-end systems that transform ambiguous customer needs into robust, measurable, and privacy-safe AI experiences
- You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and GTM to deliver high-impact features at scale
- Own the architecture: Design, evolve, and document the end-to-end AI workflow stack (prompting, retrieval, tools/function-calling, agents, orchestration, evaluation, observability, and safety) with clear interfaces, SLAs, and versioning
- Ship production systems: Build reliable, low-latency services that integrate foundation models (hosted and self-hosted), and traditional microservices
- Implement robust testing frameworks, including unit, regression, and end-to-end tests, to guarantee deterministic and predictable behavior from our AI-powered data platform. Establish safety guardrails and human-in-the-loop processes to maintain accuracy and ensure the production of ethical, responsible, and non-toxic outputs
- Optimize for cost & performance: Instrument, analyze, and optimize unit economics (token usage, caching, batching, distillation) and performance (p95 latency, throughput, autoscaling)
- Drive data excellence: Shape data contracts, feedback loops, labeling strategies, and feature stores to continuously improve model and workflow quality
- Mentor and multiply: Provide technical leadership across teams, unblock complex projects, raise code/design standards, and mentor senior engineers
- Partner across functions: Translate product intent into technical plans, influence roadmaps with data-driven insights, and communicate trade-offs to executives and stakeholders
Our take
Cloudera was founded in 2008 by former employees at Silicon Valley’s leading companies, including Google, Yahoo!, Oracle and Facebook. The firm aims to empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. This helps organizations across all industries solve age-old problems.
The platform enables users to gather real-time insights from an ever-increasing amount of big data to drive value and competitive differentiation. Although Cloudera competes with the likes of AWS, HP and IBM, it has a strong foothold itself - continuing to enhance its value through development and acquisition.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-8% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Mar 2014
$900m
SERIES F
Dec 2012
$65m
SERIES E
Total funding: $1.0bn
Company benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
- On-site gyms at various locations
- Gym reimbursement
- Paid medical disability & child bonding leaves
- Volunteer time off policy
- Quarterly team building offsites
- Tuition reimbursement
- Free and catered lunches based on office location
- Discount programs
- Business travel insurance
- Work from home opportunities
Company HQ
Santa Clara, CA
Leadership
Charles Sansbury
(CEO)Previously President and CEO at ASG Technologies, COO and CFO at The Attachmate Group, and CFO at Vignette Corporation.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 4 more jobs at Cloudera