Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Platform

Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases.

Global leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

At Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is to unleash the power of the world's real-time data with a database built for infinite scale, speed, and sustainability.

If you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.

About the Role

We're growing fast and investing deeply in our Cloud Platform-a multi-cloud, multi-tenant platform that brings the power of Aerospike to customers with maximum simplicity, speed, and scale.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to serve as a technical leader and key architect for our Cloud team. In this role, you will define the architectural vision and drive the execution of our next-generation platform services. Your work will directly shape how global enterprises deploy, manage, and scale Aerospike in the cloud, setting the technical bar for reliability, multi-tenancy, and extreme scale across multi-cloud environments.

What You'll Do

• Define Architectural Strategy: Set the long-term technical vision and multi-cloud strategy for SaaS and control-plane services, ensuring alignment with enterprise-scale customer requirements.
• Drive Cross-Functional Impact: Partner with Product Management, Security, Infrastructure, and Executive Leadership to translate complex business needs into durable, scalable technical roadmaps.
• Lead System Design for Scale: Architect high-throughput, multi-tenant control and data planes capable of managing distributed deployments under extreme load and strict SLA requirements.
• Multiply Engineering Effectiveness: Serve as a force multiplier by mentoring senior engineers, driving technical design reviews, establishing engineering best practices, and raising the overall technical capability of the organization.
• Pioneer Technical Innovation: Rapidly prototype and evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies, driving architectural evolution across container orchestration, multi-cloud automation, and resilience engineering.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end architecture and system design for complex, large-scale multi-cloud platform services.
• Collaborate with product leadership and principal architects to define and drive the multi-year Cloud technology roadmap.
• Author comprehensive RFCs and technical design documents; lead architecture review forums across engineering teams.
• Debug, profile, and solve complex, cross-cutting distributed systems issues involving networking, data consistency, multi-tenancy, and state management.
• Establish baseline standards for observability, high availability, security, and operational excellence across platform microservices.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design guidance, and career development sponsorship.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Experience: 8+ years of hands-on experience building production distributed backend systems, with demonstrated leadership at the Staff or Lead level.

• Database & Distributed Systems Mastery:

• Distributed Database Expertise: Broad experience deploying and operating production distributed databases and caching tiers (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or Aerospike).

• Data Architecture & Trade-offs: Deep understanding of NoSQL vs. Relational models, consistency models (ACID vs. BASE), and caching strategies for high-throughput, low-latency applications.

• Automated Lifecycle Management: Experience automating database operations at scale, including cluster provisioning, zero-downtime upgrades, backups, disaster recovery, and cross-region replication.

• Scalability & High Availability: Practical experience with sharding, read/write splitting, replication topologies, connection pooling, and multi-node cluster rebalancing.

• Languages & Core Tech: Deep expertise in statically typed languages (Go strongly preferred; Kotlin, Java, or C++) for backend infrastructure service design.

• Cloud & Orchestration: Advanced experience across multiple major public clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure), deep proficiency with Kubernetes, container internals, and building Kubernetes Operators/Controllers.

• Architectural Mastery: Proven track record of designing, launching, and operating enterprise-grade, multi-tenant SaaS platforms or control planes on public cloud infrastructure.

• Security & Compliance: Firm understanding of cloud security primitives, zero-trust architectures, authentication/authorization protocols (OAuth, OIDC, mTLS), and encryption at rest/in transit.

• System Design & Leadership: Exceptional ability to decompose ambiguous business problems into clean modular systems, negotiate technical trade-offs with stakeholders, and clearly communicate technical vision to leadership and engineering teams.

Preferred Skills & Qualifications

• Native fluency in Go.
• Hands-on production experience with Aerospike core features or other ultra-low latency NoSQL databases.
• Proven track record of developing custom Kubernetes Operators or Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) for data-intensive applications.
• Production experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, OpenTofu) and modern GitOps/CI/CD practices (ArgoCD, Flux).
• Active contributions to open-source cloud-native or data infrastructure projects

Salary Range: $190,000 - $220,000

(Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)

Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.

To keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.