Sr. Engineering Manager - Storage Engineering

Job Description:

At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we are the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry. Powered by relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

Business Area: Engineering

Seniority Level: Mid‑Senior level

Cloudera is looking for a strong engineering leader with a distributed systems background to lead a team within the Storage Engineering group, focused on building Apache Ozone and Apache HDFS. The Storage team is responsible for primary storage and storage access layers, which are core to the Cloudera Data Platform. Apache Ozone is an open source, massively scalable, distributed object store with a distributed file system interface, designed to scale to tens of billions of files and blocks, and to overcome the limitations of Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) such as millions of small files and managing a huge number of data nodes.

Ozone is one of the fastest‑growing products inside CDP in terms of customer adoption and expansion revenue. This is an opportunity to lead a team that created and wrote most of the Ozone code and make a huge impact on the big data storage industry.

Location: Onsite role at our HQ in Santa Clara, CA.

Responsibilities

• Manage and lead a team of talented engineers and senior individual contributors based in North America.
• Develop and execute on a technical roadmap and strategy for your team, aligning with the department’s vision and the company’s business goals.
• Lead and mentor a team of software engineers, including senior and principal‑level contributors, fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• Partner with Engineering leaders, product managers, and partner teams to understand requirements, develop solid designs and implementations, and facilitate integration and adoption.
• Drive and enforce best practices for the software development lifecycle, including coding standards, testing, deployment, system scalability, reliability, and security, tracking key performance indicators for engineering quality and efficiency.
• Communicate team progress, successes, challenges, and strategic plans clearly and transparently to engineering leadership and other business stakeholders.
• Oversee team resources, staffing, mentoring, and enhance a best‑of‑class engineering team.
• Work closely with customers in various geographies and partner teams (such as PS and support) to ensure successful adoption of Ozone and provide technical guidance for enterprise customers running hundreds of petabytes‑scale big data analytics and ML/AI pipelines.
• Guide the team in contributing to the Apache open‑source community.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with 2+ years in an engineering management role.
• Demonstrable experience with the design, implementation, and operation of large‑scale distributed systems, particularly in storage, file systems, databases, or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of fundamental storage concepts such as consistency, replication, erasure coding, and caching.
• Proven track record of leading and managing high‑performing engineering teams, demonstrating excellent communication and organizational skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Experience with publicly available papers, technical articles or blog posts is a huge plus.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience contributing to or leading large‑scale open‑source projects.
• Familiarity with the Apache Hadoop big data ecosystem (HDFS, YARN, Hive, Impala, Spark) or related distributed data frameworks.
• Experience with specific commercial or open‑source distributed storage technologies such as Ceph, Gluster, ZFS, or S3‑compatible systems.
• Experience managing remote or hybrid engineers.

Why this role matters

You will tackle complex distributed systems challenges, crafting the foundational software for the control and data planes that power CDP and keep it running at massive scale. Working at the forefront of hybrid and multi‑cloud technology, you will empower data scientists, engineers, and analysts with the tools and infrastructure they need for advanced analytics and modeling.

Collaboration is key; you will work alongside brilliant minds across product, data science, and engineering to drive innovation, standardize best practices, and shape the future of enterprise AI and data platforms. This is your chance to build the future of data and see your work make a global impact.

This role is not eligible for immigration sponsorship.

Salary: California – $203,000 – $254,000. The salary will vary depending on your job‑related skills, experience and location.

What you can expect from us

• Generous PTO policy
• Support work life balance with Unplugged Days
• Flexible WFH policy
• Mental and physical wellness programs
• Phone and Internet reimbursement program
• Access to continued career development
• Comprehensive benefits and competitive packages
• Paid volunteer time
• Employee resource groups

EEO/VEVRAA