Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Role overview

Join Cloudera’s Leading Emergent Engineering Taskforce (LEET) as a Senior Staff Backend Engineer. You will design and implement high-performance backend services with a strong focus on distributed systems, data integrity, and cloud-native resilience.

Key missions

• Design & implement high-performance backend services capable of massive throughput, optimizing for latency, memory models, and I/O efficiency.
• Own data integrity in distributed systems, tackling problems in distributed consistency, leader election, and state persistence.
• Build systems that fail gracefully using patterns such as:
  • Circuit breaking
  • Backpressure
  • Resource isolation (to prevent overload and cascading failures)

Responsibilities / profile

• Container fluency: strong understanding of orchestration principles (e.g., Kubernetes), designing for pod evictions and network partitions.
• Systems thinking: deep knowledge of distributed systems theory (e.g., CAP theorem, consensus algorithms, eventual consistency) and trade-offs between availability and consistency.
• Autonomy & execution: ability to operate with minimal direction, choosing actions needed to achieve results.

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience focused on data-intensive applications or distributed systems.
• Expert-level Java mastery, including JVM internals (concurrency, memory management) and performance at scale.
• Comfort with distributed systems problem-solving.

Nice to have

• Contributed to or modified open-source data engines (e.g., Apache Hadoop, Spark).
• Deep understanding of database internals (indexes, planners, storage engines).
• Experience refactoring monolithic legacy systems into microservices or serverless architectures.
• BSc/MSc in a related field or equivalent experience.

Benefits / work model

• Full remote / work-from-home opportunities.
• Medical plans and gym reimbursement (and paid medical disability leave mentioned).