Staff Software Engineer - Airflow

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.

At Cloudera, our Data Services Pillar is the heart of data innovation. We don’t just work with technology; we build it. Our mission is to empower data practitioners by creating seamless, enterprise-grade experiences for data engineering, warehousing, streaming, operational databases, and AI.

As a Staff Software Engineer, Airflow, you will be a key technical leader, responsible for the architecture, technical vision, and strategic evolution of the Apache Airflow-based workflow orchestration platform within the company’s data ecosystem. You will be expected to solve the most complex, ambiguous, and high-impact technical problems that span multiple teams or organizational boundaries.

As a Staff Software Engineer you will:

• Technical & Architectural Leadership: Drive the multi-quarter technical roadmap and architecture for the Airflow platform, ensuring it is secure, highly scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient for enterprise-grade workloads.
• Complex Problem Solving: Design and implement solutions for the most challenging technical issues, such as extreme scale, multi-tenancy isolation, complex scheduling, and hybrid/multi-cloud deployment models.
• Cross-Functional Impact: Collaborate closely with product management, principal engineers, and other platform teams (e.g., Spark, Kubernetes) to define and deliver core orchestration capabilities that influence the entire data platform.
• Engineering Excellence: Define and champion best practices, performance optimization, and quality standards (observability, testing, and fault tolerance) for the Airflow service and its integrations.
• Mentorship: Mentor senior and junior engineers on complex technical design, best practices, and execution, elevating the overall technical capacity of the team and organization.
• Open Source: Maintain significant contributions and influence within the Apache Airflow open-source community, aligning the project’s roadmap with product strategy.

We are excited if you have (Required Qualifications):

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent, and 6+ years of experience
• Deep Airflow Expertise: Deep, hands-on knowledge of Apache Airflow internals (scheduler, executor, serialization, REST APIs) and complex DAG authoring/optimization.
• Programming: Mastery in Python, some Java experience and extensive experience with core data platform technologies and cloud-native deployments (e.g., Kubernetes, Cloud Composer, AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Systems Thinking: Demonstrated ability to drive design and architectural decisions with a focus on non-functional requirements (security, performance, high availability, fault tolerance).
• Leadership: Proven ability to lead and drive technical projects across multiple teams without direct reporting authority.

You may also have:

• Experience defining the architecture for multi-tenant, service-oriented data platforms.
• Significant contributions to Apache Airflow or related open-source projects.
• Background in performance tuning and profiling large-scale Python and distributed applications.
• Familiarity with data governance and security frameworks (e.g., Ranger, Kerberos) and their integration with workflow orchestration.

Why this role matters:

This is your opportunity to build cloud-native solutions that are deployable anywhere whether in massive clusters on any cloud provider or in private data centers. You’ll work with cutting-edge technologies like Trino, Spark, Airflow, and advanced AI inferencing systems to shape the future of analytics. Your code will directly influence how data engineers, analysts, and developers worldwide find value in their data.

We believe in the power of open source. You’ll collaborate with project committers, contributing upstream to keep technologies like Apache Hive and Impala evolving. You’ll harden these engines for rock-solid security, optimize them for peak performance, and make them effortlessly run across all environments. Join us and help build the trusted, cloud-native platform that powers insights for the most data-intensive companies on the planet.

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