CloudZero

Distinguished Engineer, Data Platform

San Francisco · Principal · Contract

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 119 days ago

Code ReviewSQLBigQuerySnowflakeRedshiftAWSGCPAzureKafkaMachine LearningSparkData EngineeringLeadership

About the role

Our customer base is expanding, the data challenges we're solving are getting more complex, and the platform is scaling to match.
This is real platform architecture work at real scale, not a consulting role or a review-and-advise job.
This role is ideal for an architect who has built systems like this before, has the scars to prove it, and wants to see their decisions matter in direct and measurable ways for customers and for the business.

Lead end-to-end technical design for CloudZero's next-generation data platform, from event ingestion and stream processing through hot/cold storage and the query layer to the API surface
Document architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and migration strategies with the rigor of an RFC-driven process
Shape and drive every layer of the new architecture: event ingestion, stream processing and enrichment, real-time serving, analytical storage, query layer, and API
Drive Streaming Infrastructure to Production
Design and deliver CloudZero's real-time data pipeline from ingestion through enrichment to serving
Establish SLOs for throughput, latency, and correctness, and build the operational playbooks that make this system trustworthy enough to replace the batch pipelines our entire product currently depends on
Redesign CloudZero's dimensional cost model to support high-cardinality, multi-dimensional cost attribution without runaway materialization costs
Assess CloudZero's current query infrastructure, drive in-flight migrations to completion, and lead the evolution of the query engine layer going forward
Partner with product, infrastructure, and analytics engineering to define a multi-year data platform roadmap
Build consensus across engineering leadership on foundational investments including table formats, streaming frameworks, query engines, and schema management

10+ years in data engineering with a clear trajectory toward principal or staff-level architecture
Deep experience with streaming systems such as Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, or Spark Streaming at real production throughput
Experience with cost attribution, showback/chargeback, or multi-tenant data partitioning patterns
Experience driving query engine migrations while maintaining production SLAs
Track record as a technical anchor for a data platform or data engineering team

Cloud cost management is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today.
CloudZero is a SaaS platform at the intersection of next-generation cloud cost management and FinOps.
CloudZero is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity.

Drive incremental, delta-based materialization strategies using modern open table formats, dramatically reducing expensive full-rebuild jobs and unlocking millions in annual infrastructure savings

Own performance optimization across partition pruning, predicate pushdown, and query planning, and set the vision for how the query layer grows as data volumes scale 10x

Tackle real-time streaming at scale across thousands of customers simultaneously, with fault tolerance, backpressure awareness, and correctness as non-negotiables

CloudZero is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status. All job offers are contingent upon the candidate passing background and reference checks.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.
All job offers are contingent upon the candidate passing background and reference checks.

This listing is sourced directly from CloudZero's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.