Staff Software Development Engineer

Clearwater Analytics; India; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 5,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Clearwater Analytics invites a Staff Software Development Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of large-scale distributed systems powering financial reporting and analytics. You will shape technical direction, guide multi-team initiatives, and ensure architectural excellence across cloud-native platforms.

15+ years of experience and a strong track record in enterprise-grade systems are required. You will mentor engineers and drive performance, security, and cost-efficiency in

Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional software development experience.
• 5+ years in architecture or principal engineering roles.
• Experience designing enterprise-grade distributed systems for finance/analytics.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture of Clearwater ACIO systems for scalability and reliability.
• Define and document architectural standards and patterns for distributed systems.

Skills

Distributed systems architecture

Technical leadership

Microservices

Event-driven architectures

Data streaming (Kafka, Kinesis)

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Performance tuning

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science/Software Engineering

Tools

Kafka

AWS

Kinesis

Job description

The Staff Software Development Engineer role within Clearwater’s Agentic Client Interactions & Orchestration (ACIO) is a senior technical leadership position focused on architecting, designing, and delivering large-scale distributed systems that power critical financial reporting and analytics. This role requires deep expertise in scalable system design, agentic architecture, cloud-native platforms, and high-performance data processing. You will play a key role in shaping the technical direction, ensuring architectural excellence, and enabling teams to build robust, maintainable systems that support Clearwater’s commitment to industry-leading financial reporting solutions. Senior engineers at this level are expected to think strategically, lead through influence, and drive innovations that scale across products and teams. **Responsibilities:** **Architecture & Design Leadership*** Own the end-to-end architecture of Clearwater ACIO systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance in large-scale financial data processing.* Define, document, and communicate architectural standards, patterns, and best practices for distributed systems.* Evaluate and implement design patterns for fault tolerance, high availability, and horizontal scalability.* Collaborate with product managers, data architects, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into system-level designs and technical roadmaps.* Conduct architectural reviews and provide engineering guidance to ensure alignment with strategic technology vision. **Technical Strategy & Delivery*** Lead the technical strategy, operational excellence, and professional delivery across multiple domains in Clearwater.* Drive improvements in system observability, maintainability, and deployment automation.* Ensure designs and implementations meet security, compliance, and performance benchmarks.* Oversee execution of multi-team, multi-service projects, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery at scale. **Mentorship & Collaboration*** Mentor senior and mid-level engineers in architecture thinking, technical design, and distributed systems development.* Build strong relationships with teams across divisions to facilitate cross-system integration and shared technology improvements. **Innovation & Continuous Improvement*** Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging architectures, and cloud technologies.* Identify opportunities for re-architecting or optimizing existing systems to improve throughput, latency, and cost-efficiency.* Foster a culture of innovation, scalability, and engineering excellence across FO Reporting and broader Clearwater teams. **Required Skills & Qualifications:*** Proven architecture and design expertise in large-scale distributed systems, preferably in financial or analytics platforms.* Exceptional leadership skills and ability to lead through influence as a technical architect or senior tech lead.* Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and data streaming platforms (Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.).* Hands-on experience with public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), including scaling, cost optimization, and multi-region deployments.* Proficiency in one or more modern languages (Java, Python, Go, or similar) with deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance tuning.* Strong understanding of distributed data storage, database scaling, and query optimization techniques.* Worked on agentic conversational UX design and architecture.* Developed and deployed systems with complex SLAs in production environments serving high-volume traffic/data.* Excellent communication skills with ability to clearly convey architectural decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.* Commitment to continuous technical learning, improvement, and community knowledge sharing. **Education & Experience:*** Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline.* 15+ years of professional software development experience; 5+ years acting in an architecture or principal engineering capacity.* Track record of designing and implementing enterprise-grade distributed systems and owning them through full lifecycle (design → build → deploy → maintain).