CloudZero

Technology

Staff/PrincipalSoftwareEngineer

$220–290k San Francisco, California, United States FULL TIME
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Staff / Principal Software Engineer at CloudZero. Skills: Backend systems, Cloud infrastructure, Data pipelines, AI. Own technical domains end to end. Make design decisions”

Industry & Context.

Technology
Problems you'll solve

Identify problems; Solve problems

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

Significant experience building production backend systems, Proficiency in Python, Comfort reading systems in other languages, Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, Familiarity with distributed systems, Experience with data pipelines, Experience with ETL frameworks, Experience with stream processing, SQL experience, Hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses, Use AI tools in data platform work, Built internal adoption of services, Ability to communicate technical complexity, Track record of shipping

Nice to Have

Experience building agents, Experience operating agents, Experience building telemetry systems, Experience operating telemetry systems, Experience building observability tooling, Experience operating observability tooling, Kubernetes experience, AWS Step Functions experience, Lambda experience, Event-driven architectures experience, Background in FinOps, Background in billing systems, Background in financial data infrastructure, ML pipelines exposure, AI workload cost modeling exposure

What You'll Do.

Own technical domains end to end

Make design decisions

Communicate design decisions

Identify improvements

Collaborate with product

Collaborate with leadership

Collaborate with customers

Provide design feedback

Operate with autonomy

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Across teams; With stakeholders; With product; With engineering leadership; With customers

Communication Scope

Communicate technical complexity

Process & Methodology

Roadmap shaping

Full Job Description

ABOUT THE ROLE CloudZero is hiring Staff and Principal Software Engineers across our engineering organization. We're not filling a single seat. We're building a bench of senior technical talent across every team that makes CloudZero run. If you're the kind of engineer who wants to work on hard problems at real scale, own architecture decisions that matter, and see your work land directly in the hands of customers and operators, there's a place for you here. These roles sit at the intersection of technical depth and product impact. You'll be expected to lead from the front: designing systems, shaping roadmaps, mentoring engineers, and driving decisions that outlast any single sprint. The specific domain depends on where you land, but the bar and the opportunity are consistent across the org.   WHERE YOU MIGHT WORK Agent Platform This team is the spearhead of CloudZero's push into AI cost intelligence. You'll work on the AI telemetry agent that captures what coding agents and AI workloads actually cost at the developer endpoint: token usage, cost per workflow, latency, and where the value goes. You'll design the data model, ship the agent, and work directly with product on what to expose to the customer. macOS first; other endpoints to follow. A second surface on this team is our Kubernetes metric agent, already in production across customer-controlled clusters, where you're solving for resource constraints you don't set and security postures you don't control. Billing Ingest This team owns the architecture at the heart of the product: the backend data processing, storage, and query infrastructure that everything else depends on. You'll design data models, maintain and enhance a custom-built query engine, and build for scale as we onboard customers with increasingly large datasets and complex analytical requirements. If you want to work on the pipeline that processed 14 trillion billing events in the last twelve months, this is where you do it. Platform Services and A

Free ATS check

Applying for this Staff / Principal Software Engineer role?

Most applicants get filtered before a human reads their resume. See if yours makes the cut.

How to Apply on Ashby

  • Ashby is a fast modern ATS — most applications take under 3 minutes.
  • The resume parser is strong; verify parsed experience dates and job titles.
  • Custom screening questions are often scored algorithmically — answer completely.
  • Location field affects geo-based screening; use your actual metro area.

ANONYMOUS · UNFILTERED

What do employees actually say about CloudZero?

Real rants from real employees. Read before you apply.

Read Company Rants →