Staff / Principal Software Engineer

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.

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
• 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

About CloudZero

CloudZero is the AI ROI Company. We built the financial control plane for AI: the system finance, IT, and engineering use to connect every AI dollar to the outcome it produced. Across every provider. In real time. AI spend is the fastest-growing line on enterprise P&Ls and the least understood. Only 14% of CFOs can prove AI ROI today. CloudZero answers the question no one else can: what did it cost to produce this outcome, for this customer, on this model. The largest cloud spenders on the planet already run on CloudZero, including Coinbase, Duolingo, DoorDash, and Shutterstock. We processed 14 trillion billing events in the last twelve months. We're the first listed partner on Anthropic's cost and usage API. We've raised over $119 million, including a $56 million Series C backed by leading venture capital firms. 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.