CloudZero
Staff / Principal Software Engineer
$220K–$290K
San Francisco, CA +1 · Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 19, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
Boston, MA - Experience
- Significant experience is requested; no specific number of years stated.
About the job
Lead architecture and delivery of scalable backend, data, platform, integrations, or cost-optimization systems across CloudZero’s engineering organization.
What you'll do
- Own technical domains end to end, from architecture and implementation to long-term system health.
- Drive cross-team design decisions and improvements to performance, scalability, and reliability.
- Collaborate with product, leadership, customers, and engineers; mentor engineers and raise technical standards.
What they ask for
- Significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or another backend language; familiarity with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and scale tradeoffs.
- Production experience with data pipelines, ETL frameworks, or stream processing; strong SQL and hands-on cloud data warehouse experience.
- Hands-on use of AI tools in data platform work, plus evidence of shipping and delivering an artifact adopted by internal teams.
Nice to have
- Experience with agents, telemetry systems, or observability tooling; familiarity with Kubernetes, especially customer-managed environments.
- Experience with AWS Step Functions, Lambda, or event-driven architectures; background in FinOps, billing, financial data infrastructure, ML pipelines, or AI workload cost modeling.
Pay
$220K – $290K (base salary)
Tools
Python, AWS, SQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Kubernetes, AWS Step Functions
AI focus
Depending on team, build AI cost telemetry and ingestion, or contribute to AI-driven anomaly detection and AI workload cost intelligence; candidates must also use AI tools hands-on in data platform work.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative