Staff / Principal Software Engineer

CloudZero; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

CloudZero is seeking Staff and Principal Software Engineers to join our engineering teams in San Francisco. These positions focus on architecting important systems, mentoring engineers, and influencing product outcomes. Ideal candidates will possess significant experience with cloud infrastructure and backend systems.

You will work on exciting projects involving AI telemetry and billing processing, impacting our customers directly. Join us if you are ready to tackle complex challenges at scale and drive technical excellence!

Qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale.
• Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and distributed systems.
• Strong SQL and hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses.

Responsibilities

• Own significant technical domains end to end: architecture, implementation, and long-term health.
• Make and communicate high-impact design decisions across teams and stakeholders.
• Identify and drive improvements to performance, scalability, and reliability.

Skills

Python

Cloud Infrastructure (AWS preferred)

Distributed Systems

Data Pipelines

SQL

Tools

Snowflake

BigQuery

Databricks

Job description

About the Role

CloudZero is hiring Staff and Principal Software Engineers across our engineering organization. We're not filling a single seat. We're building a bench of senior technical talent across every team that makes CloudZero run.

If you're the kind of engineer who wants to work on hard problems at real scale, own architecture decisions that matter, and see your work land directly in the hands of customers and operators, there's a place for you here.

These roles sit at the intersection of technical depth and product impact. You'll be expected to lead from the front: designing systems, shaping roadmaps, mentoring engineers, and driving decisions that outlast any single sprint. The specific domain depends on where you land, but the bar and the opportunity are consistent across the org.

Where You Might Work

Agent Platform This team is the spearhead of CloudZero's push into AI cost intelligence. You'll work on the AI telemetry agent that captures what coding agents and AI workloads actually cost at the developer endpoint: token usage, cost per workflow, latency, and where the value goes. You'll design the data model, ship the agent, and work directly with product on what to expose to the customer. macOS first; other endpoints to follow. A second surface on this team is our Kubernetes metric agent, already in production across customer-controlled clusters, where you're solving for resource constraints you don't set and security postures you don't control.

Billing Ingest This team owns the architecture at the heart of the product: the backend data processing, storage, and query infrastructure that everything else depends on. You'll design data models, maintain and enhance a custom-built query engine, and build for scale as we onboard customers with increasingly large datasets and complex analytical requirements. If you want to work on the pipeline that processed 14 trillion billing events in the last twelve months, this is where you do it.

Platform Services and Applications This team owns what customers touch every day: cost intelligence features like dimensions, CostFormation, and Explorer UI, as well as the identity and authentication layer including SSO, RBAC, and multi-tenancy for enterprise customers. When you ship a feature here, customers use it immediately and you hear about it. No layers of abstraction between your work and user value.

Integrations This team builds and maintains all billing connectors across every provider CloudZero supports, and is actively expanding into AI data ingestion, building the pipelines that handle new sources of AI telemetry for customers running AI-forward workloads. If you want breadth of system surface and a fast-moving target, this is it.

Cost Optimization This team owns some of CloudZero's most customer-visible product features. That includes Optimize, which the team fully overhauled and rebuilt in FY2026, and Anomaly Detection, which is being rebuilt around a new AI-driven detection engine. The team also owns Ticket Integrations, Notifications, Views, and Budgets. If you want to work at the product surface where engineering decisions translate directly into customer outcomes, and where AI is actively reshaping what the feature set looks like, this team is doing that work now.

What You'll Do

• Own significant technical domains end to end: architecture, implementation, and the long-term health of the systems you build
• Make and communicate high-impact design decisions across teams and stakeholders
• Identify and drive improvements to performance, scalability, and reliability before they become incidents
• Collaborate with product, engineering leadership, and customers to scope problems and deliver solutions that move the business
• Raise the technical bar for the engineers around you through code review, design feedback, and direct mentorship
• Operate with a high degree of autonomy; you don't need a ticket to identify a problem worth solving

What You Bring

• Significant experience building and operating production backend systems at scale
• Strong proficiency in Python and/or another backend language; comfort reading and reasoning about systems in languages you didn't write
• Deep familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), distributed systems, and the tradeoffs that come with scale
• Experience with data pipelines, ETL frameworks, or stream processing in production environments
• Strong SQL and hands‑on experience with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar)
• You use AI tools in your own data platform work. You can describe your own workflow and the failure modes you've worked around. Strategy‑deck AI doesn't qualify; we want hands‑on
• You've built something that other internal teams have adopted. A library, a pattern, a service.
• The ability to communicate technical complexity clearly to engineers, product, and leadership
• A track record of shipping, not just designing

Bonus If You Have

• Experience building or operating agents, telemetry systems, or observability tooling
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, especially in customer‑managed environments
• Experience with AWS Step Functions, Lambda, or event‑driven architectures
• Background in FinOps, billing systems, or financial data infrastructure
• Exposure to ML pipelines or AI workload cost modeling

Equal Opportunity Employer

CloudZero is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status. All job offers are contingent upon the candidate passing background and reference checks.