Senior Software Engineer - Cloudera Context Search Team

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.
The Data Platform Pillar is the bedrock of Cloudera’s technology, where we design and build the core components that let our customers store, manage, and process data with unmatched scalability, security, and performance.
As a Senior Engineer on the Cloudera Context Search Team, you will be a key architect and contributor to the search heartbeat of the Cloudera Data Platform. You won’t just be "managing clusters"—you will be designing the high-performance, scalable, and secure search infrastructure that powers data discovery, observability, and analytics for the world’s largest enterprises.
You will bridge the gap between big data storage and real-time retrieval, ensuring that OpenSearch operates seamlessly within our containerized (Kubernetes) and multi-cloud environments.
As a Sr. Software Engineer you will:

• Architect & Scale: Design and implement large-scale OpenSearch clusters capable of handling petabytes of data with low-latency indexing and query performance.
• Platform Integration: Deeply integrate OpenSearch with CDP components (e.g., Apache Iceberg, SDX, and Ozone) to provide a unified search experience across the data lakehouse.
• Performance Tuning: Optimize JVM settings, shard allocation strategies, and query DSL to ensure maximum throughput and stability.
• Security & Governance: Implement enterprise-grade security including RBAC, TLS, and audit logging, ensuring compliance with Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX) standards.
• Cloud Native Operations: Develop and maintain Kubernetes Operators and Helm charts for automated deployment, scaling, and self-healing of search services.
• Community Contribution: Act as a liaison to the upstream OpenSearch community, contributing bug fixes, features, and performance improvements.

We are excited about you if you have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent and 5-6 years of related experience; OR Master’s degree and 3-5 years of related experience; OR PhD and 0-3 years of related experience
• Search Expertise: 5+ years of experience working with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch in a production environment at scale.
• Distributed Systems: Strong understanding of distributed system concepts (Consensus algorithms, CAP theorem, replication, and sharding).
• Programming: Proficiency in Java (core OpenSearch development) and/or Go/Python for automation and tooling.
• Infrastructure: Extensive experience with Kubernetes (K8s) and container orchestration.
• Cloud Providers: Hands-on experience deploying search workloads on AWS (EKS/AOSS), Azure (AKS), or Google Cloud (GKE).
• Big Data Ecosystem: Familiarity with the Hadoop ecosystem or modern equivalents like Spark, Flink, and Hive is a major plus.

You might also have:

• Experience with Lucene internals (segment merging, bitsets, and codecs).
• Knowledge of Vector Database capabilities within OpenSearch for Generative AI (RAG) use cases.
• History of contributing to open-source projects (Apache Software Foundation or OpenSearch Project)

**Why this role matters:**
You will tackle complex distributed systems challenges, crafting the foundational software for the control and data planes that powers CDP and keeps it running at massive scale. Working at the forefront of hybrid and multi-cloud technology, you will empower data scientists, engineers, and analysts with the tools and infrastructure they need for advanced analytics and modeling.
Collaboration is key, you will work alongside brilliant minds across product, data science, and engineering to drive innovation, standardize best practices, and shape the future of enterprise AI and data platforms. This is your chance to build the future of data and see your work make a global impact.
The expected base salary range for this role in

• California is $152,000 - $190,000

The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location
This role is not eligible for immigration sponsorship.
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