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. 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 b