Staff Software Engineer (Octopai - Modeling, APIs)

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.

About Octopai

Octopai is a fast-growing Data Intelligence company (Acquired by Cloudera) that empowers enterprises to understand, trust, and optimize their data. Our platform provides automated data lineage, cataloging, and discovery to accelerate analytics, improve governance, and drive business impact.

As we expand our platform capabilities and evolve our metadata foundations and next-generation APIs, we are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape Octopai’s modeling and API layer — the core systems that power lineage, catalog, governance, and integrations across enterprise environments.

Role Overview

As a Staff Software Engineer (Modeling, APIs), you will focus on designing and building the metadata model and API infrastructure at the heart of Octopai’s platform.

This role is deeply technical, centered on creating scalable domain representations of data assets, transformations, relationships, and governance concepts — and exposing them through robust, secure, enterprise-grade APIs.

You will work closely with backend engineers, platform teams, and product stakeholders to ensure Octopai’s modeling and API systems remain consistent, extensible, and ready for both SaaS and on-prem deployments.

As a Staff Software Engineer you will:

• Design and implement Octopai’s core metadata modeling systems, representing complex relationships across data assets, pipelines, lineage, and governance.
• Build and evolve scalable, secure APIs that power Octopai’s platform functionality and partner integrations.
• Drive improvements in API versioning, extensibility, backward compatibility, and developer experience.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to translate platform requirements into robust modeling and API solutions.
• Ensure modeling and API layers meet enterprise-grade requirements for performance, reliability, and security.
• Support integration frameworks and external consumption patterns, including SDKs and documentation standards.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to ensure APIs are deployable, observable, and maintainable across SaaS and customer-managed environments.
• Contribute to engineering quality through strong architecture practices, code reviews, and scalable backend patterns.

We’re excited about you if you have: 

• 8–12+ years of backend engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at Staff level.
• Strong expertise in building API-first backend systems or platform-level domain infrastructure.
• Excellent programming skills in C# (.NET), Java and modern backend engineering practices.
• Proven experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs and distributed backend services.
• Strong understanding of data modeling principles, metadata-driven architectures, or domain-driven design (DDD).
• Hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, ArangoDB, or similar).
• Familiarity with messaging and caching systems (Kafka, Redis, etc.).
• Understanding of authentication/authorization models (SSO, RBAC) and enterprise security principles.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and partner-facing teams.

You may also have: 

• Experience in data lineage, metadata management, cataloging, or governance platforms.
• Background with graph databases and modeling highly connected data ecosystems.
• Familiarity with OpenAPI standards, API gateways, and SDK generation.
• Knowledge of search/index systems (ElasticSearch/Solr) and metadata discovery patterns.
• Experience supporting hybrid SaaS + on-prem enterprise deployments.

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

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