Lead Data Mesh Engineer

Cloudera; Barcelona; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous PTO

Unplugged Days

Flexible WFH Policy

Wellness programs

Phone and Internet reimbursement

Continued career development

Comprehensive benefits

Volunteer time

Employee resource groups

Job summary

Cloudera is seeking a Lead Data Mesh Engineer to architect and deliver high-throughput streaming infrastructure across multi-clouds. You will own the declarative codebase, govern data contracts, and optimize cross-cloud data movement with IaC practices.

You will work on a hybrid environment with Kubernetes, AWS MSK, and NiFi, ensuring end-to-end data lineage, observability, and secure payload handling. This role requires strong leadership and hands-on delivery across large-scale data platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters in a related field or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years hands-on experience architecting and operating Kafka (AWS MSK) and NiFi in Kubernetes environments.
• Expertise in data contracts, Avro, AsyncAPI, and schema registry management.

Responsibilities

• Architect, provision, and maintain multi-AZ AWS MSK clusters and NiFi runtimes on EKS.
• Enforce data contracts using Schema Registries and governance hubs.
• Optimize egress, storage, and compute costs with advanced partitioning and compression.
• Build fault-tolerant, observable streaming pipelines with telemetry context.

Skills

Kafka

NiFi

Terraform

Kubernetes

AsyncAPI

Avro

Schema Registry

GitOps

OpenTelemetry

Education

BSc or MSc in related field

Tools

AWS MSK

Apache NiFi

Terraform

Kubernetes / EKS

Schema Registry

AsyncAPI

Avro

Open Policy Agent / Rego

ArgoCD / Flux

Job description

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're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry. Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

Business Area

IT

Seniority Level

Mid-Senior level

About The Team & Role

We are building an enterprise-grade, Everything-as-Code (EaC) Data Mesh that transforms corporate IT from a manual ticket-driven delivery model into an automated, machine-executable software factory. As the Lead Data Mesh Engineer, you will own the architectural execution and hands-on delivery of our high-throughput, asynchronous event-streaming infrastructure and hybrid data pipelines. Operating in an environment where every asset, route, and policy must exist as declarative code inside Git, you will architect the "Data-in-Motion" backbone across multi-cloud environments (AWS MSK, Apache NiFi on EKS) and insulate our core on-premises data lakehouse.

As a Lead Data Mesh Engineer, you will:

• Event-Streaming Architecture (IaC): Architect, provision, and maintain multi-AZ Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (AWS MSK) clusters and Apache NiFi runtimes on Amazon EKS (Graviton ARM64) using Terraform and declarative GitOps patterns.
• Contract-First Schema Governance: Integrate vendor-neutral Schema Registries (AWS Glue / Apicurio) to enforce strict Apache Avro and AsyncAPI data contracts defined in our central Governance Hub before payloads hit production event topics.
• Egress & FinOps Optimization: Implement high-performance partition strategies, dynamic storage auto-scaling (gp3/io2), and mandatory local payload compression (Snappy/Zstd) to minimize cross-cloud data movement fees and optimize compute consumption.
• Resiliency & Out-of-Band Telemetry: Build fault-tolerant Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) automated replay loops and ensure all streaming payloads carry lightweight, out-of-band tracing context across service hops.

We are excited if you have (Required Experience):

• Bsc/Msc in related field or equivalent experience
• Distributed Observability: Practical understanding of out-of-band telemetry exhaust, OpenTelemetry standards, and W3C distributed tracing context propagation (Datadog, Otel/OpenTelemetry).
• Core Streaming & Orchestration: 6+ years of deep, hands-on experience architecting and operating Apache Kafka (preferably AWS MSK) and Apache NiFi in containerized Kubernetes environments (EKS).
• Data Serialization & Contracts: Expertise in Apache Avro, AsyncAPI, and schema registry management for Master Data Management (MDM) enforcement.

You may also have:

• Exposure to Policy-as-Code tools (Open Policy Agent / Rego).
• Hybrid Mesh & Lakehouse Integration: Demonstrated background connecting cloud event meshes to enterprise data lakehouses or big-data monoliths (Cloudera CDP, Hadoop, Hive).
• Infrastructure-as-Code & GitOps: Advanced proficiency with Terraform and GitOps deployment tools (ArgoCD or Flux) operating under a strict pull-based model.

What you can expect from us:

• Generous PTO Policy
• Support work life balance with Unplugged Days
• Flexible WFH Policy
• Mental & 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