CloudZero

Technology

Staff/PrincipalSoftwareEngineer

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

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Staff / Principal Software Engineer at CloudZero. Skills: AI Cost Intelligence, Data Processing, Backend Systems, Cloud Infrastructure. Own technical domains end to end. Make design decisions”

What You'll Achieve.

Connect AI dollar to outcome

Industry & Context.

Technology
Problems you'll solve

Root cause analysis; Troubleshooting

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, Exposure to ML pipelines, Exposure to AI workload cost modeling

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

Provide direct mentorship

Operate with high degree autonomy

Identify problems worth solving

Solve resource constraints

Solve security postures

Maintain query engine

Build billing connectors

Expand AI data ingestion

Build AI telemetry pipelines

Overhaul product features

Rebuild product features

Rebuild detection engines

Own ticket integrations

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

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

Communication Scope

Communicate technical complexity

Process & Methodology

Roadmap planning

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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