Senior Software Engineer- Opensearch

Business Area:

Engineering

Seniority Level:

Mid-Senior level

Job Description: 

At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry.  Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

Role Overview

As a Senior OpenSearch Engineer, you will be a key architect and contributor to the search heartbeat of the Cloudera Data Platform. You won’t just be "managing clusters"—you will be designing the high-performance, scalable, and secure search infrastructure that powers data discovery, observability, and analytics for the world’s largest enterprises.

You will bridge the gap between big data storage and real-time retrieval, ensuring that OpenSearch operates seamlessly within our containerized (Kubernetes) and multi-cloud environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect & Scale: Design and implement large-scale OpenSearch clusters capable of handling petabytes of data with low-latency indexing and query performance.

• Platform Integration: Deeply integrate OpenSearch with CDP components (e.g., Apache Iceberg, SDX, and Ozone) to provide a unified search experience across the data lakehouse.

• Performance Tuning: Optimize JVM settings, shard allocation strategies, and query DSL to ensure maximum throughput and stability.

• Security & Governance: Implement enterprise-grade security including RBAC, TLS, and audit logging, ensuring compliance with Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX) standards.

• Cloud Native Operations: Develop and maintain Kubernetes Operators and Helm charts for automated deployment, scaling, and self-healing of search services.

• Community Contribution: Act as a liaison to the upstream OpenSearch community, contributing bug fixes, features, and performance improvements.

Technical Requirements

• Search Expertise: 5+ years of experience working with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch in a production environment at scale.

• Distributed Systems: Strong understanding of distributed system concepts (Consensus algorithms, CAP theorem, replication, and sharding).

• Programming: Proficiency in Java (core OpenSearch development) and/or Go/Python for automation and tooling.

• Infrastructure: Extensive experience with Kubernetes (K8s) and container orchestration.

• Cloud Providers: Hands-on experience deploying search workloads on AWS (EKS/AOSS), Azure (AKS), or Google Cloud (GKE).

• Big Data Ecosystem: Familiarity with the Hadoop ecosystem or modern equivalents like Spark, Flink, and Hive is a major plus.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Lucene internals (segment merging, bitsets, and codecs).

• Knowledge of Vector Database capabilities within OpenSearch for Generative AI (RAG) use cases.

• History of contributing to open-source projects (Apache Software Foundation or OpenSearch Project).

Why Cloudera?

At Cloudera, we believe data can make what is impossible today, possible tomorrow. We empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. You’ll work on a platform that handles more data than almost anyone else on the planet, surrounded by a team that values candor, innovation, and open-source integrity.

What you can expect from us:

• Generous PTO Policy 

• Support work life balance with Unplugged Days

• Flexible WFH Policy 

• Mental & Physical Wellness programs 

• Phone and Internet Reimbursement program 

• Access to Continued Career Development 

• Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages 

• Paid Volunteer Time

• Employee Resource Groups

EEO/VEVRAA

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