Senior Staff Engineer — Anywhere Cloud Cloudera Object Store

Business Area:

Seniority 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.

What You'll Build

Cloudera is reimagining object storage for the Kubernetes era. Our customers will deploy and operate it entirely through AWC (Anywhere Cloud), our control plane for running data infrastructure on any Kubernetes cluster. 

The Technical Surface

You won't touch all of this every day, but you should be comfortable picking up any of it when the system needs you to.

You'll work across:

• Rust: Async I/O with tokio, io_uring buffer rings, zero-copy.

• Java: Existing Apache Ozone codebase contribute upstream fixes, and maintain the stable contract between Java metadata services and the Rust data plane.

• Go: Kubernetes operator built on controller-runtime, CRDs, reconcilers for StatefulSets/Deployments/PVs, init container orchestration, status conditions, and event reporting.

• Kubernetes: Persistent volumes and storage classes, pod topology and anti-affinity, Istio ambient mesh for mTLS, NetworkPolicies, node maintenance flows, rolling upgrades, ResourceQuotas.

• Distributed Systems: Erasure coding (RS-3-2, RS-6-3, RS-10-4), Ratis consensus, container replication, block deletion at scale, scrubber and reconciliation, online/offline EC reconstruction.

What You'll Actually Do

As a Builder

• Own end-to-end implementation of major features—from design spec through merged code to production validation.

• Contribute upstream to Apache Ozone for shared components.

• Build the Kubernetes-native test suite,  S3 conformance, EC fault injection via pod eviction, decommission and maintenance mode flows, and bit rot detection.

As a Force Multiplier

• Mentor engineers across the Rust, Go, and Java parts of the stack. The team has deep individual expertise but needs someone who can connect the dots between layers.

• Run rigorous technical reviews. We don't approve PRs that pass tests but skip invariant verification. We don't ship features without articulated failure modes. You will set this bar.

• Make and document architectural decisions. Not every choice has a "right" answer—what matters is that the rationale survives the engineer who made it.

• Push back on scope creep, hidden complexity, and "let's add it just in case" thinking. Three similar lines of code beats a premature abstraction.

What You Bring

Required

• 8+ years building production distributed systems, with at least 3 years at the Staff level (or equivalent). You've owned systems through architecture, implementation, on-call, and customer escalations.

• Deep expertise in at least two of: Rust, Go, Java. You don't need to be world-class in all three on day one, but you've shipped non-trivial code in multiple languages and aren't religious about which language solves a given problem.

• Strong storage or distributed systems background. You understand consensus protocols (Raft, Paxos), erasure coding tradeoffs (latency vs. durability vs. storage overhead), the cost of fsync, and why "exactly once" is a lie.

• Production Kubernetes experience. You've written operators, debugged controller reconciliation loops, traced networking issues across CNI/Istio, and understand the gap between kubectl apply succeeded and "the system actually works."

• Track record of technical leadership. Design specs you've authored that others built from, architectural decisions that survived contact with reality, and PR feedback that measurably improved code.

• Comfort with ambiguity. You make progress when the spec isn't clear, upstream behavior is undocumented, and the team disagrees on the approach.

Strongly Preferred

• Apache Ozone or HDFS experience: Direct contribution to either project, or operations experience at scale (PB+). If you've debugged a Ratis pipeline issue or chased down a container replication anomaly, we want to talk.

• S3 protocol experience: You've implemented an S3-compatible server, written a SigV4 signer/verifier from scratch, or operated S3-compatible storage in production at scale.

• Performance engineering: Profiling with perf/dhat/flamegraphs, understanding memory allocator behavior, or experience with io_uring, RDMA, or other modern I/O frameworks.

• Open source contributions: Apache projects, Rust ecosystem crates (tokio, hyper, tonic), Kubernetes (kubebuilder, controller-runtime), or storage systems (RocksDB, Ceph, MinIO).

• Multi-cloud / Kubernetes distribution experience: You've shipped software for EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, and on-prem K8s without special-casing each one.

You may also have:

• Erasure coding internals: ISA-L, Jerasure, or equivalent. You know what a Reed-Solomon generator matrix looks like and why CPU vectorization matters for stripe reconstruction throughput.

• Network protocol design: You've designed a wire protocol that survived real workloads. You know the difference between "gRPC streaming" and "actually achieving low latency over gRPC streaming."

• Istio / service mesh expertise: You've debugged mTLS handshake failures, written EnvoyFilters, and understand the cost of an L7 proxy hop in the data path.

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

EEO/VEVRAA

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