Principal Engineer, Public Cloud / R&D Core

Cloudera is a leading data platform company that empowers organizations to transform complex data into actionable insights. The Principal Engineer will lead the design and architecture of large-scale cloud services, ensuring scalability and resilience while collaborating with stakeholders to translate requirements into engineering tasks.

Responsibilities:

• Architectural Leadership: Serve as the primary technical lead, independently driving the design and architecture of complex, large-scale cloud services that underpin our multi-cloud and hybrid data management platform. Determine the optimal technical approach to resolve high-friction challenges and deliver solutions that are highly scalable, resilient, and high-quality
• Stakeholder Alignment and Definition: Act as the critical bridge between engineering and stakeholders (internal and external) to diagnose root causes of friction. Translate ambiguous business requirements into precise engineering tasks and concrete architectural blueprints for the development team
• Technical Authority and Mentorship: Drive technical excellence across the team. Act as the technical authority for Senior and Full-Stack engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, enforcing DevSecOps best practices, and guaranteeing all solutions meet 'production-ready' standards
• Complex Problem Solving: Tackle the most difficult technical challenges and system interactions where existing documentation or standard procedures fall short. Apply advanced engineering principles to debug complex interactions between Hadoop components and modern Cloud-Native architectures
• Strategic Influence: Synthesize technical insights derived from strategic initiatives and feed this information back to Cloudera’s core Global Engineering teams. Use this deep understanding to directly influence the future architecture and product roadmap of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP)

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent, and 10+ years of experience; OR Master's degree and 6+ years of experience; OR PhD and 4+ years of experience
• 10+ years of experience building and scaling robust products. You understand the trade-offs of low-latency, high-throughput systems at a fundamental level
• You don't just write Java; you understand the JVM. You have a deep track record of building concurrent, high-performance applications
• Expert-level proficiency with Kubernetes and Docker, understanding how to utilize containerization for building portable and resilient services
• Solid foundational knowledge of Linux environments, networking, virtual machines, and container technologies (e.g., Docker), coupled with practical experience using CI/CD solutions such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions
• You demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and a bias for action in your work. You are committed to clean architecture, maintainable patterns, and delivering software designs at the Principal level
• Strong background in public cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure), with expertise in security, infrastructure provisioning, containerization, and service enablement. Good understanding of BareMetal and VM stack
• Exceptional collaboration and communication abilities, enabling effective work with diverse, cross-functional teams globally
• A strong dedication to mentoring and developing team members, helping them reach their maximum potential