Staff Software Engineer - Flink

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 at 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. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our development team and play a key technical leadership role in shaping Cloudera’s Streams Messaging and Streaming Analytics products. You’ll work with industry-leading technologies including Apache Flink and related components, helping build an easy-to-use, secure, highly scalable platform for ingesting, processing, and analyzing massive message streams across data-driven applications — from Edge to AI. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will combine deep technical expertise with architectural leadership and hands-on engineering. You’ll influence technical direction, drive complex initiatives from design through delivery, mentor engineers, and collaborate with teams across Hungary, the United States, and other global locations. This is an opportunity to have a significant impact on the evolution of Cloudera’s cloud-native streaming platform. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will: Provide technical leadership and architectural direction for complex, cross-functional initiatives across our streaming products.Develop deep expertise in Apache Flink, Cloudera Streaming, and the broader streaming ecosystem.Design, implement, test, and release highly scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable features for our cloud-native streaming platform with hybrid-cloud deployment capabilities.Lead technical design discussions and make sound architectural decisions across distributed systems, APIs, services, and platform capabilities.Drive complex engineering projects from technical concept through implementation, testing, release, and production adoption.Work closely with Product Management, UX, Support, Documentation, SRE, and other engineering teams to deliver high-quality customer outcomes.Mentor and coach engineers, raising engineering standards and helping develop technical talent across the organisation.Collaborate across geographically distributed teams in Hungary, the United States, and other global locations.Partner with field engineering and customers to understand complex use cases, troubleshoot issues, and facilitate successful product adoption.Contribute to engineering best practices around scalability, reliability, security, observability, performance, and automated testing.Represent Cloudera in relevant open source communities, contributing upstream where appropriate. We’re excited about you if you have: BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, and/or 8+ years of relevant software engineering experience.Extensive experience building scalable, robust distributed systems and cloud-native software.Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, design patterns, and engineering best practices.Strong Java skills and extensive experience across the Java ecosystem.Significant experience with Apache Flink or comparable distributed stream-processing technologies.Experience with Kubernetes and Docker and modern cloud-native architectures.Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership without relying on formal management authority.Experience driving complex technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams.Strong track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction.Self-driven and highly motivat