Staff / Principal Software Engineer

The role

Staff and Principal Software Engineers will own technical domains, design systems, and mentor engineers. Work involves architecture, implementation, and improving performance, scalability, and reliability across various teams like Agent Platform, Billing Ingest, and Platform Services.

What you will do

• Own significant technical domains end to end including architecture, implementation, and long-term health
• Make and communicate high-impact design decisions across teams and stakeholders
• Identify and drive improvements to performance, scalability, and reliability
• Collaborate with product, engineering leadership, and customers to scope problems and deliver solutions
• Raise the technical bar through code review, design feedback, and direct mentorship
• Operate with a high degree of autonomy

Required qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or another backend language
• Comfort reading and reasoning about systems in languages you didn't write
• Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and the tradeoffs that come with scale
• Experience with data pipelines, ETL frameworks, or stream processing in production environments
• Strong SQL and hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar)
• Use of AI tools in data platform work
• Built something that other internal teams have adopted such as a library, pattern, or service
• Ability to communicate technical complexity clearly to engineers, product, and leadership
• Track record of shipping

Nice to have

• Experience building or operating agents, telemetry systems, or observability tooling
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, especially in customer-managed environments
• Experience with AWS Step Functions, Lambda, or event-driven architectures
• Background in FinOps, billing systems, or financial data infrastructure
• Exposure to ML pipelines or AI workload cost modeling
• AWS preferred

About the company

CloudZero is the AI ROI Company that built the financial control plane for AI. The company connects AI spend to outcomes and serves large cloud spenders like Coinbase, Duolingo, DoorDash, and Shutterstock.