Staff Software Engineer

Cloudera

~$129,500 - $240,500Market Estimate

US-Texas-Remote

Full-Time

Senior (7+ yrs)

Engineering & Development

Posted on May 5, 2026

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.

This role is not eligible for immigration sponsorship.

Impala is an established SQL Data Warehouse engine that facilitates low-latency analytical queries on petabyte-scale data. Impala is employed by many fortune 500 companies for a wide range of analytic workloads, from subsecond interactive dashboards with hundreds of concurrent users to rich data exploration.

Cloudera actively contributes to the open-source Impala project (http://impala.apache.org/) while also extending it to serve as the data warehousing component of Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) and in containerized environments as Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW). We are looking for a seasoned engineer who is familiar with databases, HPC, and distributed systems to help us drive innovation and maintain industry-leading performance of the Impala engine.

As a Staff Software Engineer you will:

Design and implement query engine components for low latency and scalability
Lead projects in adding new functionality in distributed systems and dealing with concepts of performance, fault-tolerance
Design and implement Impala features in both the on-premise and cloud space
Contribute to productivity, process and infrastructure improvement
Work with product managers and customers to understand requirements
Analyze large-scale distributed systems to identify performance bottlenecks, scalability issues, failure points, and security holes
Formulate and present your architecture and design documents internally and to the open source community
Contribute to software productivity process and infrastructure improvements
Publicize Impala through blogs and conference presentations

We are excited if you have (Required experience):

8+ years of professional software development experience; a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience is preferred
Experience leading and delivering complex product enhancements
Experience in writing high-performance, enterprise-quality code in C++ or Java
Familiar with database concepts and Linux development environments
Strong troubleshooting, debugging, and performance tuning skills.
Excellent communication skills

You may also have:

Prior involvement in open source community, especially related Apache technologies
Experience with data warehouse and/or database internals
Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and cloud object storage

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 CDW 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.

What you can expect from us: