Staff Systems Engineer - Anywhere Cloud

Business Area:

Engineering

Seniority Level:

Mid-Senior 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.

Ready to take cloud innovation to the next level? Join Cloudera’s Anywhere Cloud team and help deliver a true “build your own pipeline, bring your own engine” experience. enabling data and AI workloads to run anywhere, without friction or vendor lock-in.

We take the best of the public cloud- cost efficiency, scalability, elasticity, and agility and extend it to wherever data lives: public clouds, private data centers, and even the edge. Powered by Kubernetes, our hybrid architecture separates compute and storage, giving customers maximum flexibility and optimized infrastructure usage.

We are looking for a Staff Systems Engineer to design and build high-performance infrastructure for Anywhere Cloud (AWC). AWC is Cloudera's Kubernetes-native platform for deploying data services onto any cluster, including air-gapped environments. The systems layer handles credential brokering, protocol-level proxying, request signing, and distributed log collection. These are Rust services deployed on Kubernetes where correctness and latency matter equally.

This is not a feature-engineering role. You will own infrastructure where a subtle bug means a security bypass and a naive implementation means unbounded memory growth. You will set the technical direction for performance-critical services, mentor engineers on systems thinking, and provide the low-level capabilities that the rest of the platform depends on.

Key Responsibilities:

• High-Performance Service Development: Build and own Rust-based infrastructure services (reverse proxies, credential brokers, log collectors) that sit in the data path. Ship end-to-end from design doc to production.

• Correctness in Security-Critical Code: Implement and verify authentication protocols and access control enforcement. Write thorough tests (including property-based and fuzz testing) for code where bugs have security implications.

• Systems Architecture: Design new infrastructure components. Define module boundaries, memory budgets, streaming patterns, and graceful shutdown semantics. Document tradeoffs clearly.

• Observability: Build distributed telemetry and log collection systems. Instrument services with structured tracing, metrics, and health endpoints.

• Cross-Team Guidance: Be the go-to engineer when other teams need systems-level help. Performance-sensitive design reviews, streaming patterns, caching strategies.

• Technical Direction: Drive design documents for new components. Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions. Define testing strategies that give confidence in critical code paths.

We’re excited about you if you have: (Minimum Qualifications)

• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering, with at least 3 years building performance-critical or security-critical systems (proxies, storage engines, network services, or similar).

• Rust: You have shipped production Rust services (not just CLIs or libraries). Comfortable with async Rust, multi-crate workspaces, and the tokio/hyper ecosystem.

• Systems Fundamentals: Strong understanding of networking (TCP/HTTP), memory management, streaming/backpressure, and concurrency. You can reason about resource constraints and design accordingly.

• Security Awareness: Experience working on systems where correctness has security implications. Comfortable reasoning about authentication protocols, input validation, and adversarial edge cases.

• Kubernetes: Experience deploying and operating services on Kubernetes. Familiarity with the operator pattern, Helm, and cloud-native infrastructure.

• Testing: You go beyond happy-path unit tests. Experience with property-based testing, integration test harnesses, or fuzz testing.

You may also have: (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience with S3-compatible storage protocols or request signing (SigV4 or similar).

• Experience building or operating observability/telemetry pipelines (OpenTelemetry, gRPC, log aggregation).

• Prior work on reverse proxies, load balancers, service meshes, or API gateways.

• Experience with performance profiling and optimization (flamegraphs, benchmarking, P99 latency work).

• Experience building Kubernetes operators or controllers.

This role is not eligible for immigration support or relocation.

• Why this role matters:

  This is more than cloud management, it’s about building the foundation for a consistent, secure, and compliant cloud experience that gives organizations 100% access to 100% of their data, anywhere.

  With the recent acquisition of Taikun, we are simplifying Kubernetes and cloud management even further, creating a platform that is unified, scalable, and future-ready.

  If you are passionate about Kubernetes, not just using it but building it at the core managing workloads across hybrid clouds and datacenters and obsessed with performance, devops, etc. this is where you belong.

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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