Staff Software Engineer in Test - Anywhere Cloud - Performance and Scale

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.

Job Title: Staff Software Engineer in Test - Anywhere Cloud - Performance and Scale

Team Overview

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.

The Role

As a Staff Software Engineer in Test you will architect automation framework and tools that validates a highly distributed, multi-cluster control plane from performance and resilience point of view. You will own the test strategy for AWC - validating it both as an application installed via Taikun and as a platform that orchestrates other clusters. You will define how we verify Zero-Trust security models, API-first contracts, and cross-cluster resource management.

Key Responsibilities

Test Architecture Leadership: Design, architect, and scale comprehensive automated performance frameworks capable of validating the core control plane, cluster provisioning, and multi-cluster engine deployments under massive load.

Baseline: Create baseline test suites for measuring performance from release to release.

Data Layer & Metastore Scale Testing: Build high-concurrency test suites for the containerized metadata and storage layers to ensure they meet strict enterprise-grade targets for vast table limits, high operations per second, and concurrent client support with extremely low read latency.

Mentorship & Optimization: Profile performance bottlenecks in microservices, analyze underlying infrastructure resource utilization, provide architectural optimization recommendations to engineering teams, and mentor junior and mid-level test engineers on distributed systems performance testing.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with the Taikun (Kubernetes) and Foundational Services teams to integrate their components (Cert Manager, DBs, Logging) into the AWC test matrix.

Requirements

Experience: 8+ years of professional Software in Test (SDET), Performance Engineering, or Quality Engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Staff/Lead Engineer (IC4) building large-scale performance testing frameworks for distributed cloud-native platforms.

Performance Engineering Mastery: Deep expertise in building custom load generators and using industry-standard tools (e.g., JMeter, Gatling, Locust, k6) to validate throughput, latency, and concurrency limits across REST, gRPC, and database connections.

Kubernetes & Infrastructure: Deep, hands-on expertise in Kubernetes scaling limits, profiling node/pod resource bottlenecks, evaluating Service Mesh (Istio ambient mode) overhead, and benchmarking storage IOPS (Ceph, S3 object storage).

Programming Languages: Expert-level coding proficiency in Go (Golang), Python, or Java to build robust performance test frameworks and custom Kubernetes operators for stress testing.

Engine & Data SME: Advanced understanding of modern compute/streaming engine performance characteristics (Spark memory tuning, Kafka throughput, Flink state backends) and Lakehouse scale limitations (Apache Iceberg).

Observability & Profiling: Advanced knowledge of integrating and utilizing observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to monitor p95/p99 latencies, track resource utilization, and identify memory leaks or CPU bottlenecks during soak tests

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