Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Platform at Aerospike in Mountain View, CA

Job description

• We’re growing fast and investing deeply in our Cloud Platform—a multi-cloud, multi-tenant platform that brings the power of Aerospike to customers with maximum simplicity, speed, and scale.
• We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to serve as a technical leader and key architect for our Cloud team. In this role, you will define the architectural vision and drive the execution of our next-generation platform services. Your work will directly shape how global enterprises deploy, manage, and scale Aerospike in the cloud, setting the technical bar for reliability, multi-tenancy, and extreme scale across multi-cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Define Architectural Strategy: Set the long-term technical vision and multi-cloud strategy for SaaS and control-plane services, ensuring alignment with enterprise-scale customer requirements.
• Drive Cross-Functional Impact: Partner with Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, and Executive Leadership to translate complex business needs into durable, scalable technical roadmaps.
• Lead System Design for Scale: Architect high-throughput, multi-tenant control and data planes capable of managing distributed deployments under extreme load and strict SLA requirements.
• Multiply Engineering Effectiveness: Serve as a force multiplier by mentoring senior engineers, driving technical design reviews, establishing engineering best practices, and raising the overall technical capability of the organization.
• Pioneer Technical Innovation: Rapidly prototype and evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies, driving architectural evolution across container orchestration, multi-cloud automation, and resilience engineering.
• Lead end-to-end architecture and system design for complex, large-scale multi-cloud platform services.
• Collaborate with product leadership and principal architects to define and drive the multi-year Cloud technology roadmap.
• Author comprehensive RFCs and technical design documents; lead architecture review forums across engineering teams.
• Debug, profile, and solve complex, cross-cutting distributed systems issues involving networking, data consistency, multi-tenancy, and state management.
• Establish baseline standards for observability, high availability, security, and operational excellence across platform microservices.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and career development sponsorship.

Requirements

• Experience: 8+ years of hands-on experience building production distributed backend systems, with demonstrated leadership at the Staff or Lead level.
• Distributed Database Expertise: Broad experience deploying and operating production distributed databases and caching tiers (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or Aerospike).
• Data Architecture & Trade-offs: Deep understanding of NoSQL vs. Relational models, consistency models (ACID vs. BASE), and caching strategies for high-throughput, low-latency applications.
• Automated Lifecycle Management: Experience automating database operations at scale, including cluster provisioning, zero-downtime upgrades, backups, disaster recovery, and cross-region replication.
• Scalability & High Availability: Practical experience with sharding, read/write splitting, replication topologies, connection pooling, and multi-node cluster rebalancing.
• Languages & Core Tech: Deep expertise in statically typed languages (Go strongly preferred; Kotlin, Java, or C++) for backend infrastructure service design.
• Cloud & Orchestration: Advanced experience across multiple major public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure), deep proficiency with Kubernetes, container internals, and building Kubernetes Operators/Controllers.
• Architectural Mastery: Proven track record of designing, launching, and operating enterprise-grade, multi-tenant SaaS platforms or control planes on public cloud infrastructure.
• Security & Compliance: Firm understanding of cloud security primitives, zero-trust architectures, authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth, OIDC, mTLS), and encryption at rest/in transit.
• System Design & Leadership: Exceptional ability to decompose ambiguous business problems into clean modular systems, negotiate technical trade-offs with stakeholders, and clearly communicate technical vision to leadership and engineering teams.
• Native fluency in Go.
• Hands-on production experience with Aerospike core features or other ultra-low latency NoSQL databases.
• Proven track record of developing custom Kubernetes Operators or Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for data-intensive applications.
• Production experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, OpenTofu) and modern GitOps/CI/CD practices (ArgoCD, Flux).
• Active contributions to open-source cloud-native or data infrastructure projects

Skills

Required

• Go (strongly preferred)
• Kotlin
• Java
• C++
• Kubernetes
• Container internals
• Kubernetes Operators/Controllers
• AWS
• GCP
• Azure
• MongoDB
• Redis

Preferred

• Go (native fluency)
• Aerospike core features
• Ultra-low latency NoSQL databases
• Custom Kubernetes Operators
• Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)
• Terraform
• OpenTofu
• ArgoCD

Benefits

• (Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)