Senior Staff Backend Engineer

About Cloudera

Cloudera empowers people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, Cloudera is the preferred data partner for 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.

About the Role

The Leading Emergent Engineering Taskforce (LEET) is a new, agile operational unit designed to execute on Cloudera's most critical strategic initiatives. Operating as an "empowered pod," it bridges the gap between abstract requirements and real-world execution, tackling both complex customer integrations and high-impact internal engineering projects.

As the Senior Backend Engineer, you will be the Guardian of Resilience, ensuring the system maintains stability under massive production loads. You will transform rapid prototypes into robust, production-grade services, applying advanced engineering concepts to ensure strategic initiatives survive contact with reality.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineering for Scale: Design and implement high-performance backend services that can withstand massive throughput, focusing on latency, memory models, and I/O efficiency to ensure solutions scale linearly.
• Distributed State Management: Own data integrity challenges by solving difficult problems regarding distributed consistency, leader election, and state persistence.
• Resilience & Observability: Build systems that fail gracefully by implementing advanced patterns for circuit breaking, backpressure, and resource isolation.
• Cloud-Native Architecture: Apply principles of immutable infrastructure and container orchestration, ensuring stateful applications run reliably in dynamic environments like Kubernetes.
• Technical Rigour: Solve complex problems where standard documentation does not exist, analyzing JVM internals, garbage collection, and thread contention to optimize critical paths in data pipelines.

Required Experience

Primary experience with Java and distributed systems principles that transcend language or framework boundaries.