Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Business Area:

Seniority 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.

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.

As a Sr. Staff Software Engineer you will:

• 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.

We are excited about you if you have:

• 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.

You might also have:

• 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.

This role is not eligible for immigration sponsorship

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

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