CloudZero
Technology
Staff/PrincipalSoftwareEngineer
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.
“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.
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
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