Staff Software Development Engineer

Job Summary:

The Staff Software Development Engineer role within Clearwater FO Reporting is a senior technical leadership position focused on architecting, designing, and delivering large-scale distributed systems that power critical financial reporting and analytics. This role requires deep expertise in scalable system design, microservices architecture, cloud-native platforms, and high-performance data processing.

You will play a key role in shaping the technical direction, ensuring architectural excellence, and enabling teams to build robust, maintainable systems that support Clearwater’s commitment to industry-leading financial reporting solutions. Senior engineers at this level are expected to think strategically, lead through influence, and drive innovations that scale across products and teams.

Responsibilities:

Architecture & Design Leadership

• Own the end-to-end architecture of Clearwater FO Reporting systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance in large-scale financial data processing.
• Define, document, and communicate architectural standards, patterns, and best practices for distributed systems.
• Evaluate and implement design patterns for fault tolerance, high availability, and horizontal scalability.
• Collaborate with product managers, data architects, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into system-level designs and technical roadmaps.
• Conduct architectural reviews and provide engineering guidance to ensure alignment with strategic technology vision.

Technical Strategy & Delivery

• Lead the technical strategy, operational excellence, and professional delivery across multiple domains in Clearwater.
• Drive improvements in system observability, maintainability, and deployment automation.
• Ensure designs and implementations meet security, compliance, and performance benchmarks.
• Oversee execution of multi-team, multi-service projects, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery at scale.

Mentorship & Collaboration

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers in architecture thinking, technical design, and distributed systems development.
• Build strong relationships with teams across divisions to facilitate cross-system integration and shared technology improvements.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging architectures, and cloud technologies.
• Identify opportunities for re-architecting or optimizing existing systems to improve throughput, latency, and cost-efficiency.
• Foster a culture of innovation, scalability, and engineering excellence across FO Reporting and broader Clearwater teams.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Proven architecture and design expertise in large-scale distributed systems, preferably in financial or analytics platforms.
• Exceptional leadership skills and ability to lead through influence as a technical architect or senior tech lead.
• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and data streaming platforms (Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), including scaling, cost optimization, and multi-region deployments.
• Proficiency in one or more modern languages (Java, Python, Go, or similar) with deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance tuning.
• Strong understanding of distributed data storage, database scaling, and query optimization techniques.
• Developed and deployed systems with complex SLAs in production environments serving high-volume traffic/data.
• Excellent communication skills with ability to clearly convey architectural decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Commitment to continuous technical learning, improvement, and community knowledge sharing.

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline.
• 13+ years of professional software development experience; 5+ years acting in an architecture or principal engineering capacity.
• Track record of designing and implementing enterprise-grade distributed systems and owning them through full lifecycle (design → build → deploy → maintain).