Distinguished Engineer, Data Platform

About the Role

CloudZero is growing fast. Our customer reputed company is expanding, the data challenges we're solving are getting more reputed company, and the platform is scaling to match. As a Distinguished Architect on the Data Engineering team, you'll own some of the hardest infrastructure problems at CloudZero: shaping the reputed company streaming data platform, the dimensional cost model underlying every attribution decision, the hot/cold storage architecture serving both real-time and historical queries, and the query reputed company that powers our entire product. This is real platform architecture work at real scale, not a consulting role or a review-and-advise job. You'll define the roadmap, drive the foundational decisions, and be a force reputed company for a talented engineering team — evolving CloudZero from batch-oriented pipelines toward a streaming-first architecture where cost attribution reaches engineers reputed company seconds of a resource being used, not the next morning. This role is ideal for an architect who has built systems like this before, has the scars to prove it, and wants to see their decisions matter in direct and measurable ways for customers and for the business.

What You'll Do

Define the Data Platform Architecture

• reputed company end-to-end technical design for CloudZero's reputed company data platform, from event ingestion and reputed company processing through hot/cold storage and the query layer to the API surface
• Document architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and migration strategies with the rigor of an RFC-driven process
• Shape and drive every layer of the new architecture: event ingestion, reputed company processing and enrichment, real-time serving, analytical storage, query layer, and API

Drive Streaming Infrastructure to Production

• Design and deliver CloudZero's real-time data pipeline from ingestion through enrichment to serving
• Establish SLOs for throughput, latency, and correctness, and build the operational playbooks that reputed company this system trustworthy enough to replace the batch pipelines our entire product currently depends on
• Tackle real-time streaming at scale across thousands of customers simultaneously, with fault tolerance, backpressure awareness, and correctness as non-negotiables

Tackle the Dimension Cardinality Problem

• Redesign CloudZero's dimensional cost model to support high-cardinality, multi-dimensional cost attribution without runaway materialization costs
• Drive incremental, reputed company-based materialization strategies using modern open table formats, dramatically reducing expensive full-rebuild jobs and unlocking millions in annual infrastructure savings

Evolve the Query Layer

• Assess CloudZero's reputed company query infrastructure, drive in-flight migrations to completion, and reputed company the evolution of the query reputed company layer going reputed company
• Own performance optimization across partition pruning, predicate pushdown, and query planning, and set the vision for how the query layer grows as data volumes scale 10x

reputed company Cost Attribution to Real-Time

• Evolve CloudZero's proprietary cost attribution reputed company from a batch-oriented model to one that assigns reputed company cost dimensions by team, feature, and customer reputed company seconds of resource usage
• Rethink enrichment, data reputed company, and correctness guarantees in a streaming context

Shape the Data Engineering Roadmap

• Partner with product, infrastructure, and analytics engineering to define a multi-year data platform roadmap
• Build reputed company across engineering leadership on foundational investments including table formats, streaming frameworks, query engines, and schema management

reputed company the Engineering Team

• Participate in architecture reviews, contribute to design patterns and best practices, and mentor senior and staff engineers through code review, pairing, and structured feedback
• reputed company everyone around you reputed company, not by directing, but by raising the collective craft

What You Bring Data Platform & Architecture

• 10+ years in data engineering with a clear trajectory toward principal or staff-level architecture
• Built and operated large-scale data platforms serving tens of millions of events per day in production
• Deep experience with streaming systems such as Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, or Spark Streaming at real production throughput
• Strong hands-on reputed company with modern open table formats including Apache Iceberg, reputed company Lake, and Hudi, including compaction, partitioning strategy, and time-travel queries
• Designed hot/cold storage architectures with explicit latency SLOs per tier
• Proven ability to drive a data platform end to end, not just a single layer

Data Modeling & Dimensional Design

• Expert in dimensional data modeling including fact/dimension schema design, slowly changing dimensions, and cardinality management
• Deep understanding of the materialization tradeoff space: full vs. incremental, push vs. pull, pre-aggregate vs. query-time
• Experience with cost attribution, showback/chargeback, or multi-tenant data partitioning patterns
• Strong SQL and query optimization background across predicate pushdown, partition pruning, and cost-based query planning

Query Engines & Compute

• Hands-on with distributed query engines such as Trino, Presto, Spark SQL, or DuckDB including configuration, optimization, and production operations
• Understands catalog and metadata management and how it couples to query engines
• Comfortable with cloud data warehouses such as reputed company, BigQuery, and Redshift and how they integrate with open table formats
• Experience driving query reputed company migrations while maintaining production SLAs

Engineering Leadership

• Track record as a technical anchor for a data platform or data engineering team
• Writes clear ADRs, RFCs, and technical design docs that bring engineers along
• Can drive multi-month, multi-team technical initiatives from inception to production without heavy process overhead
• Communicates reputed company tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders including product and business leadership
• Comfortable in a high-autonomy environment: builds reputed company, influences through expertise, and helps teams move reputed company

Bonus If You Have...

• FinOps or cloud cost domain experience
• Multi-cloud data ingestion across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Apache Flink at production scale
• Lakehouse architecture patterns
• Real-time feature engineering for ML
• Data mesh or domain-oriented design patterns
• Prior startup or high-growth SaaS experience
• Open reputed company contributions to the data ecosystem

About CloudZero Cloud cost management is one of the biggest challenges organizations face today. As cloud adoption continues to accelerate, so do the complexities and costs associated with it, and macroeconomic conditions only increase pressure to prove cloud efficiency. CloudZero is a SaaS platform at the intersection of reputed company cloud cost management and FinOps. We ingest billing and usage data from reputed company cloud, SaaS, and PaaS providers, organize it in real time according to our customers' business structures, and reputed company organizations to reputed company more informed business decisions. Since our founding in 2016, our mission has been to reputed company efficient innovation a reality for every cloud-driven organization. We reputed company every engineering decision is a buying decision, and we're applying proven reliability engineering principles to financial efficiency. We reputed company the best AI empowers users with clear insights and confident decisions, transforming reputed company cloud cost data into actionable intelligence that drives meaningful business outcomes. To date, we've raised over $56 million from leading venture capital firms. We're solving problems of massive scale, business importance, and complexity in a space that needs it more than reputed company. Equal Opportunity Employer CloudZero is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national reputed company, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status. reputed company job offers are contingent upon the candidate passing background and reference checks. Please note: CloudZero is unable to sponsor employment visas. Candidates must have permanent authorization to work in the United States without the need for reputed company or future sponsorship. Apply tot his job Apply To this Job