Staff Software Engineer - Flink

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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.

At Cloudera, our Data Services Pillar is at the heart of data innovation. We don’t just work with technology; we build it. Our mission is to empower data practitioners by creating seamless, enterprise-grade experiences for data engineering, warehousing, streaming, operational databases, and AI.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our development team and play a key technical leadership role in shaping Cloudera’s Streams Messaging and Streaming Analytics products. You’ll work with industry-leading technologies including Apache Flink and related components, helping build an easy-to-use, secure, highly scalable platform for ingesting, processing, and analyzing massive message streams across data-driven applications — from Edge to AI.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will combine deep technical expertise with architectural leadership and hands-on engineering. You’ll influence technical direction, drive complex initiatives from design through delivery, mentor engineers, and collaborate with teams across Hungary, the United States, and other global locations. This is an opportunity to have a significant impact on the evolution of Cloudera’s cloud-native streaming platform.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will:

• Provide technical leadership and architectural direction for complex, cross-functional initiatives across our streaming products.

• Develop deep expertise in Apache Flink, Cloudera Streaming, and the broader streaming ecosystem.

• Design, implement, test, and release highly scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable features for our cloud-native streaming platform with hybrid-cloud deployment capabilities.

• Lead technical design discussions and make sound architectural decisions across distributed systems, APIs, services, and platform capabilities.

• Drive complex engineering projects from technical concept through implementation, testing, release, and production adoption.

• Work closely with Product Management, UX, Support, Documentation, SRE, and other engineering teams to deliver high-quality customer outcomes.

• Mentor and coach engineers, raising engineering standards and helping develop technical talent across the organisation.

• Collaborate across geographically distributed teams in Hungary, the United States, and other global locations.

• Partner with field engineering and customers to understand complex use cases, troubleshoot issues, and facilitate successful product adoption.

• Contribute to engineering best practices around scalability, reliability, security, observability, performance, and automated testing.

• Represent Cloudera in relevant open source communities, contributing upstream where appropriate.

We’re excited about you if you have:

• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, and/or 8+ years of relevant software engineering experience.

• Extensive experience building scalable, robust distributed systems and cloud-native software.

• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, design patterns, and engineering best practices.

• Strong Java skills and extensive experience across the Java ecosystem.

• Significant experience with Apache Flink or comparable distributed stream-processing technologies.

• Experience with Kubernetes and Docker and modern cloud-native architectures.

• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership without relying on formal management authority.

• Experience driving complex technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams.

• Strong track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction.

• Self-driven and highly motivated, with a strong sense of ownership, engineering craftsmanship, and accountability.

• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

You may also have:

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Experience with Scala, Python, and/or JavaScript.

• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and modern software delivery practices.

• Experience with messaging and streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka.

• Experience contributing to Apache or other open source projects, including upstream development and community collaboration.

• Experience with streaming analytics, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, or real-time data processing.

• Experience working with highly available, secure, and performance-sensitive distributed systems.

Why this role matters:

This is an opportunity to help shape the technical future of Cloudera’s cloud-native streaming platform and the way organisations process data in real time.

You’ll work at the intersection of distributed systems, streaming, cloud infrastructure, and AI, solving complex engineering challenges that span massive clusters, multiple cloud providers, and private data centres. Your technical leadership will directly influence how data engineers, developers, and organisations ingest, process, and derive value from data at scale.

We believe in the power of open source. You’ll have opportunities to collaborate with and contribute to projects such as Apache Flink, Kafka, and related technologies, helping evolve the ecosystem while bringing enterprise-grade security, reliability, performance, and operability to our customers.

Join us as a Staff Software Engineer and help build the trusted, cloud-native streaming platform powering real-time data applications from Edge to AI.

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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