Cloud Control Plane Engineer

Teradata; California (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Teradata is seeking a senior engineer to join its Office of the CTO, shaping the next generation of the platform. You will own the control plane, focusing on provisioning, scaling, and secure exposure across multi-environment deployments.

You will design lifecycle orchestration, build APIs and controllers, and collaborate with infrastructure engineers to ensure scalable, reliable, and coherent system behavior, with AI-assisted tools accelerating exploration and implementation.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and building distributed systems or platform services.
• Strong familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience designing APIs, service orchestration, and system coordination patterns.
• Understanding of identity, access, and security models in distributed systems (OIDC, SAML).
• Programming experience in a backend language (Go, Java, Python).
• Experience designing systems with scalability, reliability and cost-performance.
• Comfort working in environments where architecture boundaries are still being defined.

Responsibilities

• Design and build control plane systems for lifecycle management, orchestration, and coordination of distributed infrastructure.
• Define provisioning, scaling, and management through APIs and service-based interfaces.
• Shape system behavior around scaling, availability, and multi-environment operation.
• Design identity and access models, including integration with OIDC or SAML.
• Build or extend control mechanisms such as controllers and workflow-driven provisioning systems.
• Contribute to runtime-driven provisioning and lifecycle workflows that respond to system demand.
• Use AI-assisted tools to accelerate development and explore implementation approaches.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to define clean boundaries between system layers.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

API design

System coordination

Backend programming

AI-assisted development

Scalability

Tools

Kubernetes operators

eBPF

Open-source control planes

Job description

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. Teradata's Autonomous Knowledge Platform activates enterprise intelligence by unifying data, knowledge, and business context to achieve tangible outcomes. With Teradata, organizations can provide agents with full context for impact when it matters. Our solution lets businesses connect and scale on premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach. Teradata delivers real business value with AI.

About The Role

Join a small advanced research team within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer focused on shaping the next generation of Teradata's platform. This role centers on the control layer — how systems are orchestrated, coordinated, and exposed. You'll design and build services that manage lifecycle, define system behavior, and provide the interfaces through which infrastructure is controlled and consumed. Working in a greenfield environment, you'll help define how the control plane operates — from provisioning and scaling to secure exposure. These systems are intended to support highly scalable workloads and evolve into customer-facing capabilities. You'll be working in areas where scale introduces new constraints, and system behavior under coordination and change is as important as correctness. You'll operate with significant ownership, using AI-assisted tools to explore and implement designs quickly while ensuring coherence and reliability.

What You'll Do

• Design and build control plane systems responsible for lifecycle management, orchestration, and coordination of distributed infrastructure.
• Define how infrastructure is provisioned, scaled, and managed through APIs and service-based interfaces.
• Shape system behavior around scaling, availability, and multi-environment operation.
• Design identity and access models, including integration patterns with systems such as OIDC, SAML, or similar frameworks.
• Build or extend control mechanisms such as controllers, coordination services, or workflow-driven provisioning systems.
• Contribute to runtime-driven provisioning and lifecycle workflows that respond to system demand.
• Use AI-assisted tools to accelerate development and explore implementation approaches.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineering to define clear boundaries between system layers.

Who You Will Work With

You will work within a small, senior Advanced Research Team inside Teradata's Office of the CTO — where your contributions directly shape architecture and direction. You will collaborate with:

• Infrastructure engineers who build the compute layer below the control plane, working with you to define clean boundaries between system layers.
• Systems researchers and senior architects with deep expertise in distributed systems, platform design, and database internals who provide technical direction and mentorship.
• Peers who bring the same ownership mindset — a small team where architecture decisions have long-term consequences and everyone's work is visible.

What Makes You a Qualified Candidate

• Experience designing and building distributed systems, platform services, or control layers.
• Strong familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience designing APIs, service orchestration, and system coordination patterns.
• Understanding of identity, access, and security models in distributed systems (e.g., OIDC, SAML, or similar).
• Programming experience in a backend language (e.g., Go, Java, Python, or similar).
• Experience designing systems with scalability, reliability, and strong cost-performance characteristics.
• Comfort working in environments where architecture and system boundaries are still being defined.

What You'll Bring

• You've built systems that other engineers or customers depend on to operate reliably at scale.
• You've designed coordination or control systems that manage complex infrastructure behavior.
• You understand system interactions beyond individual services.
• You're motivated by shaping platforms early where your decisions define long-term behavior.
• AI-assisted development fluency — you're comfortable using AI tools to explore designs, accelerate implementation, and expand the range of what you can build, while ensuring systems remain robust and scalable.

Nice to have

• Background in big data, data pipelines, or analytical platforms — understanding the scale and volume of data the underlying engine processes helps you build the right abstractions.
• Familiarity with query engine or analytical database architectures (DataFusion, Trino, Presto, Spark, or similar). The control plane problems are largely engine-agnostic, but awareness of what sits below is valuable.
• Experience adapting or extending open-source control planes (Kubernetes operators, custom controllers, service mesh configurations) to meet non-standard requirements.
• Experience with eBPF, kernel performance tuning, or NUMA-aware hardware configuration.

Teradata invites all identities and backgrounds in the workplace. We work with deliberation and intent to ensure we are cultivating collaboration and inclusivity across our global organization. We are proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, ancestry, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related conditions), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, military and veteran status, or any other legally protected status.